Your Probabilistic JEPA Is Secretly a Hidden Markov Model: A State-Space Interpretation of Joint-Embedding Predictive Learning

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.13621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A hidden Markov model (HMM) combines three roles: inference of a hidden-state belief from observations, propagation through a Markov transition, and emission back to observation space. We show that full, time-indexed Predictive Information Bottleneck VJEPA (PIB-VJEPA) exposes the same computational structure: a stochastic context encoder plays the role of an amortized filtering distribution, a probabilistic predictor defines latent-state dynamics,