Supervised machine learning in high-energy physics (HEP) requires training on labeled simulations of particle collisions, which are known to be unfaithful to the underlying physics. This leads to significant inaccuracies and biases in the transfer of trained models to real data, limiting the power of deep learning methods. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a promising alternative for pretraining directly on real, unlabeled data. However, existing techniques largely operate with inductive biases inspired by domains such as images and natural language. We propose RINO (Renormalization Group DIstillation with NO Labels), which, for the first time, exploits the fundamentally multi-scale renormalization group structure of high-energy jet formation as a physically grounded source of SSL views. We define teacher-student representations across energy scales using different levels of hierarchical clustering, aligned via DINO-style self-distillation. To mirror the background-dominated nature of real collider data, RINO pretrains exclusively on jets from quantum chromodynamics (QCD) processes and is evaluated on out-of-distribution (OOD) transfer to rare signal classes. In our controlled data-efficiency study, RINO matches fully supervised training on JetNet after finetuning on only 1% of the labeled data. With the full labeled dataset, RINO improves OOD classification accuracy on top-quark jets by 5.9% and, without retraining, improves AUC on the unseen Higgs boson decay channel $H \to 4q$ by 4.1% over the strongest SSL baseline. Scale-structure diagnostics reveal that DINO-style self-distillation permits our backbone to retain scale-dependent structure. Ablation studies show that this accounts for an 8.6% OOD accuracy gap with respect to alternative SSL paradigms such as SimCLR. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15919
How do we tell a world model what information to preserve? We study this question through the lens of spectral representation learning. We introduce SpecWM, a JEPA framework that explicitly specifies desired relationships between observations through a target similarity kernel and trains the encoder to reproduce those relationships in its embedding geometry. Different kernels provide different supervision, ranging from physical state information to a fully self-supervised temporal kernel requiring only the ordering of observations within trajectories. We characterize the global optima of the objective, establish conditions for linear recoverability and invariance to nuisance information, and connect temporal-kernel similarity to the behavioral successor measure under an idealized setting. Empirically, the choice of kernel strongly controls which physical quantities are recoverable from the representation. More importantly, temporal spectral alignment improves CEM planning success over LeWorldModel from 52% to 68% on OGBench Cube, 49% to 77% on OGBench Scene, and 29% to 51% on CALVIN. These results suggest that explicitly specifying representation geometry provides a simple way to steer what latent world models preserve for control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15429
Self-supervised learning on 3D medical images commonly relies on random sub-volume sampling during pretraining. However, random cropping implicitly treats all spatial regions as equally worth observing, despite anatomical priors and spatial redundancy that make regions inherently unequal in their value for representation learning. To this end, we first show through controlled crop-quality manipulations that better sub-volumes lead to better downstream transfer, revealing the observation policy as an overlooked bottleneck in 3D medical SSL. Motivated by this finding, we revisit sub-volume sampling as a \emph{where-to-look} problem. We propose \textbf{\method}, a plug-and-play framework that replaces random cropping with an offline coarse-to-fine probe bank guided by \textit{anatomy-awareness}, \textit{informativeness}, and \textit{diversity}. We instantiate \method as a lightweight \lite variant using geometric and image-statistical cues, and a diagnostic \feat variant using frozen visual features, to examine whether lightweight volume-intrinsic priors suffice or richer semantic cues reliably provide additional value. Extensive experiments across multiple 3D medical SSL backbones and downstream tasks demonstrate that \method-\lite consistently improves transfer performance over random sampling. Mechanistic analyses further attribute these gains to more anatomically plausible and informative observations, reduced spatial redundancy, more efficient learning dynamics, and more structured representations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13915
Accurate detection of drivable area is essential for autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. While state-of-the-art methods focus on general traversability estimation, they prove inadequate for snow-covered roads where following existing wheel tracks offers crucial advantages: improved traction, predictable vehicle dynamics, and verified path stability. To address this, we propose a low-cost, self-supervised approach detecting safety-critical wheel tracks using synchronized RGB-I (RGB + Long-Wave Infrared) imagery. Our method automatically generates training labels by projecting future wheel trajectories from recorded GNSS data. A neural network is designed to identify wheel tracks with the 4-channel RGB-I images from challenging, white-out road surfaces. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in visually monotonous and featureless adverse environment, offering a robust and cost-effective alternative for winter autonomy. The newly introduced ThermalTrack dataset is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13872
Machine learning models are increasingly used for automated feature extraction from weakly annotated bioimaging data, such as microscopy and cytomorphology images. Due to the sole dependency of automated feature extraction, existing methods yield inconsistent classification performance across weakly annotated datasets. Here, we propose a model-agnostic knowledge augmentation method that enables ML models to exploit domain knowledge beyond what automated feature extraction can capture. The proposed approach improves classification performance across seven ML architectures. When integrated with masked autoencoder-based self-supervised learning, our method achieves the strongest overall performance, improving precision by 2.9% over the next-best method on three in-house microscopy datasets and by an average of 6.8% across three public cytomorphology benchmarks. We perform nucleus-level classification based on mislocalization of TAR DNA-binding protein 43 (TDP-43) from the nucleus to the cytoplasm, a phenotype linked to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), using three independent microscopy datasets of motor neurons derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. Accurate quantification of this phenotype at scale remains challenging and may contribute to inconsistencies across studies. Application of the best-performing model to these microscopy datasets reveals biological interpretations related to ALS, including dose-dependent effects of the proteasomal stressor, MG132, and the oxidative stressor, sodium arsenite (SA), on TDP-43 mislocalization, variable pathology in motor neurons from sporadic and familial ALS donors, and a lack of protection of the pharmacological compounds, edaravone and niclosamide, against SA-induced TDP-43 mislocalization. Together, our pipeline enables in-vitro cellular image analysis to advance understanding of ALS-associated pathology and potential treatments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13637
Representation autoencoders (RAE), created by pairing a frozen pretrained self-supervised learning (SSL) encoder with a trained decoder, have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on image generation. Their use in the audio domain, however, remains limited: text-to-audio (TTA) models are typically trained in the latent space of dedicated autoencoders where the encoder and the decoder are trained jointly with reconstruction objectives. This paper presents a study on audio representation autoencoders (AuRA) and their applicability to general audio TTA. We train decoders for two pretrained SSL audio encoders and evaluate their reconstruction quality against autoencoders used by recent TTA systems. After obtaining decoders for the SSL representations, we also train rectified flow models in the SSL and baseline latent spaces to isolate the autoencoder's effect on generation. We find that generation in SSL spaces achieves comparable or superior performance to generation in the baseline spaces, despite differences in reconstruction performance. These results highlight that reconstruction quality alone is not a sufficient proxy for generative performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26881
Anomaly detection, the identification of collision events that deviate from Standard Model expectations, is one of the most promising model-agnostic strategies for new-physics searches at the Large Hadron Collider. Searching for rare events in learned low-dimensional representations removes the need to commit to hand-crafted observables a priori, but sacrifices the immediate physical interpretation those observables provide. For anomaly detection to enter a discovery pipeline, flagged events must therefore be diagnosed locally, both to distinguish potential new physics from mismodeling or detector effects and to identify observables for targeted follow-up searches. We evaluate supervised and self-supervised neural embedding strategies on COLLIDE-2V, a 750-million-event dataset simulated under realistic High-Luminosity LHC conditions, using the reconstruction error of an autoencoder trained in the learned latent space as the anomaly score. Across the configurations and benchmark signals considered, supervised objectives, which exploit simulation process labels during training, generally outperform their self-supervised counterparts and, in their best configurations, improve on an autoencoder trained directly on kinematic features, raising the signal efficiency at 10% background acceptance on all held-out processes. We further introduce a local diagnostic pipeline that fits a Gaussian Mixture Model to the SM latent space, profiles each component through high-level observables without process labels, localizes the flagged events, and ranks observables by their local discriminating power. The ranking recovers the defining kinematics of the held-out processes, while correlating the anomaly score with the same observables quantifies how closely the score tracks them, revealing cases where the most discriminating observable is not the one the score follows most closely.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13437
Reliable real-time failure detection is critical for deploying learned robotic policies, yet defining failures explicitly is infeasible in open-world settings. This motivates failure detection from nominal demonstrations alone. Existing methods, however, struggle to balance robustness to benign variations with the ability to capture semantic and interaction-level errors. We introduce Robot-WATCHDOG, a self-supervised framework that models manipulation scenes as object-centric spatio-temporal graphs. Building on this representation, we investigate two complementary failure scores: Trajectory Projection and Correlation (TPC), a non-parametric measure of geometric deviation and relational consistency, and GnnT, a Graph Attention Network with a Transformer that predicts future object states. We evaluate both on a public benchmark and on a new dataset of semantically complex manipulation tasks, across six tasks and ten random seeds. Both scores outperform image-based failure detectors, particularly on semantic and interaction-level failures. TPC provides the strongest performance in AUPR and MCC on both dataset averages, with low variance across seeds. Qualitative results are made available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13403
Skeleton-based human action recognition has gained increasing attention due to the stability of skeleton data across diverse environments and advances in motion capture technologies. Following the success of supervised learning approaches, self-supervised learning approaches, particularly contrastive learning ones, have achieved impressive performance. However, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose a plug-in robustification module via quantization for contrastive learning in self-supervised skeleton-based human action recognition (QCLR), which enhances the robustness of representations against adversarial attacks while preserving their representational capability. Specifically, we employ a dual-level quantization scheme across the encoding pipeline, which breaks the gradient propagation and absorbs small adversarial perturbations within the quantization bins. To mitigate the impact of inevitable quantization error, we further design an attention-guided multi-faceted quantization strategy to maintain the representation quality. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that integrating QCLR into a progressive lineage of mainstream contrastive learning models substantially improves robustness against both gradient-based white-box and gradient-free black-box adversarial attacks, while preserving highly competitive classification accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13281
Can a vision model learn what words mean from pixels alone? We show that the two largest DINOv3 vision transformers organize words rendered in images by word meaning, despite being pretrained using self-supervision on images only, without paired captions, class labels, or other language supervision. We derive word representations from embedding differences between word images and matched controls, then test whether semantically related words are neighbors within each model's embedding space, while controlling for spelling similarity. We find that brand names in the same industry group together, as do nouns from the same semantic domain. Country-capital pairs exhibit consistent vector offsets, similarly to word embeddings trained on text. These word representations also align with the representations of the visual object categories they name. DINOv3-H and DINOv3-7B are, to our knowledge, the first self-supervised vision models to show substantial semantic structure for rendered words. Comparisons with text and speech encoders reveal shared structure among representations of the same words. Contrastive alignment with either encoder further strengthened DINOv3-H's word-level semantic structure, while leaving the other finetuned vision models largely unchanged. Image-only training can therefore teach vision models not just what words look like, but also how their meanings relate.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13252
Unlike the clean and pixel-aligned complete pieces of standard jigsaw benchmarks, real-world puzzle fragments lose their boundary regions to erosion, destroying the signal that classical compatibility measures (CMs) rely on. We first re-establish, via oracle experiments, that the CM, not the solver, is the performance bottleneck: with a perfect CM, even a simple greedy solver achieves perfect reconstruction. This motivates STITCH, a self-supervised CM that sidesteps missing boundaries by comparing frozen ViT patch tokens from piece interiors via a lightweight cross-attention head (~249K trainable parameters), trained without manual annotation. Plugged into unchanged compatibility-based solvers, STITCH reaches .992/.954 Abs/Perf on JPwLEG-5 (+.629 Perf over the best prior method), nearly saturating the benchmark. On a new ImageNet 7x7 benchmark, it outperforms all alternatives, including inpaint-then-match pipelines built on modern generative models. Importantly, performance remains robust across erosion levels and generalizes to puzzles with over 40% missing pieces without retraining. Trained on the recent GAP datasets of irregular, heavily eroded fragments, the same CM recipe enables compatibility-based solvers to surpass recent learning-based solvers on GAP-3 and GAP-5. Since this leap in performance is achieved by a pluggable CM module, the takeaway is clear: fix the match, not the solver.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13176
Broadcast archives offer scale and diversity for self-supervised learning (SSL) but contain substantial noisy, non-speech, and multilingual content. Prior work typically relies on voice activity detection or language identification (LID) to extract speech, ensuring presence rather than quality. Whether and how to filter unlabeled speech by quality for SSL, particularly from noisy broadcasts, remains underexplored. We present a large-scale Finnish SSL study starting from 2.1M hours of unconstrained broadcast audio. We propose automatic speech recognition (ASR) confidence as a proxy for pretraining data quality and show 3-7% relative WER improvements over LID-based filtering despite a smaller training set. We further address the lack of controlled architectural comparisons in speech SSL by evaluating Transformer, Macaron-Net, Conformer, and E-Branchformer at matched parameter budgets. Our models improve upon prior Finnish SSL baselines, particularly at Base scale and out-of-domain.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13102
Forecasting rare, high-cost events in multivariate time-series systems is hard because their precursors are seldom observed, so a purely data-driven model has little to learn from. The engineers who run these systems, however, hold knowledge that precedes such events, information absent from the scarce labels. We call this a semantic prior and inject it into a self-supervised event forecaster through two switchable mechanisms, a covariate mechanism and an attention-bias mechanism, each the identity at its null, so one architecture serves every prior type with no per-dataset architecture search. A prior helps when it supplies information the observed window does not already contain: in a short context an informative prior beats no prior in-domain (pooled h-AUROC over the no-prior baseline: a periodicity clock +14%, p<0.001; a conservation residual +47% at a 0.25 label fraction), and a working prior transfers out-of-domain (+53%), substituting for feature transfer, while priors the window already recovers stay inert and the attention-bias mechanism shows no measurable gain. KITE is a switchable, attributable route to contextual conditioning, and a substrate for scaling toward cross-domain, pretrained time-series foundation world models that carry their governing structure explicitly.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12738
World models improve sample efficiency by training policies on imagined trajectories, but their usefulness depends on learning representations that capture the information needed for future control. We study whether self-supervised joint-embedding prediction (JEPA) can provide this learning signal for multi-agent reinforcement learning. We introduce MA-JEPA, a stochastic world model that replaces observation reconstruction with prediction of target representations, enabling model-based multi-agent reinforcement learning with centralized training and decentralized execution. A categorical latent state and a causal Transformer are trained with posterior and action-conditioned dynamics prediction objectives and are then used for actor-critic learning from latent imagination. A training-only joint predictor conditions on all agents' local states and actions to predict each agent's next local observation embedding. These predictions are passed through the same local posterior used during real interaction with a centralized critic that is used only for value learning, with execution remaining decentralized. Our experiments show that this architecture performs strongly on SMAC, matching or exceeding the strongest reported comparator mean win rate on four of eight evaluated maps.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33563
Self-supervised multimodal representation learning has achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, yet capturing synergistic information remains challenging due to the complexity of cross-modal interactions. Unlike the shared information across individual modalities, synergy arises when task-relevant signals emerge only from the joint configuration of multiple modalities and cannot be recovered from any modality in isolation. This work focuses on how to preserve the information capacity for such synergistic signals in multimodal representations. The key observation is that synergistic information is reflected in higher-order statistical dependence among modalities, which provides a principled target for explicitly modeling joint interactions. Motivated by this insight, we propose Higher-order Representation and Information Learning (HRIL), which constructs an empirical cross-moment tensor over modality embeddings to represent multi-way interactions. HRIL employs Tucker decomposition to obtain a core tensor, complemented by a synergy-aware regularizer that prevents energy concentration and preserves higher-order coupling capacity for synergistic information capture. Experiments on the controlled synergy task and real-world benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over existing multimodal contrastive methods, with notable gains on tasks dominated by synergistic interactions. Code is released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12393
Cardiovascular diagnosis and treatment rest on integrating complementary modalities, such as electrocardiogram, echocardiography, and chest X-rays, each capturing distinct but complementary aspects of cardiac pathophysiology. Yet most medical foundation models remain modality-specific, combining modalities only for finetuning or post-training. This discards the cross-modal evidence clinicians naturally integrate and ignores the structure within each modality. We introduce Latent-Attention Masked Autoencoder (LAMAE), a multimodal, structure-aware masked autoencoder that jointly learns patient-level representations during self-supervised pretraining. Instead of fusing modalities post hoc, LAMAE exchanges information directly in the latent space through a shared latent-attention module operating over a study-view-entity hierarchy, enabling aggregation of variable observations and handling of missing modalities. Pretrained on over 500'000 MIMIC-IV hospital stays, LAMAE outperforms modality-specific pretraining and strong contrastive and vision-language baselines across multimodal hospital-stay tasks, such as in-hospital mortality, ICD-10 and DRG coding, and length of stay, while remaining competitive on unimodal tasks. Modeling this structure also pays off within a single modality: even without cross-modal information, the latent-attention module improves representations over modality-specific pretraining.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12035
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies assume the embodiment on which they were trained and can fail when a joint fault changes how commanded actions are physically executed. Existing fault-recovery methods often require task-specific retraining, fault labels, explicit diagnosis, or privileged embodiment information. We introduce CAPABLE, a unified capability-aware adaptation framework for frozen VLAs that integrates self-supervised capability inference with residual reinforcement learning. CAPABLE infers capability, how much of the commanded motion each joint actually realizes and how that motion contributes to end-effector behavior, online from command-response history and kinematics using a temporal encoder shared across joints, Jacobian grounding, cross-joint attention, and self-supervised physical prediction. The resulting representation conditions a residual policy that adds bounded corrections to the VLA arm action without fault labels or faulty-joint identifiers. Across 28 LIBERO tasks, CAPABLE raises success on an actuator excluded from fault training from 24.8% to 59.3%, outperforming a parameter-matched global-history baseline by 17.4 points while preserving healthy performance. Leave-one-actuator-out experiments across six joints show that this transfer is not specific to one actuator, and additional evaluations characterize transfer to unseen fault families and demonstrate recovery on a physical Franka Panda. this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11971
Detecting intra-operative speech impairment during awake craniotomy is essential for preserving language function. However, automated detection remains challenging because operating-room recordings contain substantial acoustic interference, clinically relevant speech events are rare, and available cohorts are small and heterogeneous across speakers. This study presents a systematic component-wise evaluation of a pipeline for distinguishing dysarthric from no-trouble speech in the DATABRASE corpus of awake-craniotomy recordings. The pipeline incorporates speaker diarization to isolate patient speech, a multi-view representation combining handcrafted acoustic descriptors with multilayer wav2vec 2.0 embeddings, speaker-conditional normalization and transferability-based feature selection to improve cross-speaker robustness, and a cascaded classifier comprising a gradient-boosted first stage and a neural second stage. Evaluation was conducted under strict speaker-independent conditions using leave-one-speaker-out cross-validation. The results show that cross-speaker performance is influenced more strongly by the speech representation than by classifier choice. The AUCs of three classifiers differed by no more than 4.7%, whereas replacing conventional acoustic descriptors with the multilayer self-supervised representation produced AUC improvements of 18.2%-26.1%. Diarization-conditioned feature extraction and the proposed classifier cascade provided additional consistent gains. These findings indicate that reliable patient-specific speech isolation and strong pretrained representations are more important than increased classifier complexity in low-resource intra-operative settings. They also quantify the potential performance gains that may be achieved through patient-specific preoperative calibration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11825
Onboard Artificial Intelligence can improve responsiveness and bandwidth efficiency of Earth Observation systems by processing data directly on the satellite. This paper presents the experience gained from the development, onboard integration, and post-launch adaptation of a lightweight marine anomaly detection pipeline deployed on the European Space Agency's $\Phi$sat-2 mission. The application combines sea segmentation, self-supervised feature encoding of marine regions, generic anomaly detection based on deviations from a normal sea state, and optional characterization of selected anomaly types. Before launch, the pipeline was trained and validated on simulated $\Phi$sat-2 imagery to assess algorithmic performance and compatibility with resource-constrained onboard hardware. After integration and functional validation in the mission environment, early experiments on real $\Phi$sat-2 acquisitions revealed a significant mismatch between simulated and in-orbit data. The pipeline was therefore retrained on real Level-1 imagery using an improved annotation strategy to better handle ambiguous marine regions, substantially enhancing performance. Beyond demonstrating the onboard feasibility of the application, the $\Phi$sat-2 experience highlights the importance of robust annotation strategies and sensor-aware design, and shows that simulation-based development is valuable for pre-flight risk reduction, while reliable scientific validation requires representative in-orbit data and should be clearly distinguished from functional validation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11735
Parallel magnetic resonance imaging reconstruction is an ill-posed inverse problem under undersampling. Multi-coil acquisition and Hankel lifting expose complementary repeated information: observations of the same anatomy across coils and repeated local k-space neighborhoods in overlapping windows. These dependencies guide recovery of missing k-space data. However, splitting lifted Hankel entries for self-supervision can place the original sample in both input and target, causing data leakage. We propose Hankel Subspace Self-Supervised Reconstruction (HSSRecon), a scan-specific reconstruction framework for parallel magnetic resonance imaging. HSSRecon partitions data by physical acquisition units before Hankel lifting and applies multiplicity normalization to repeated Hankel copies in overlapping windows. Rather than learning a mapping that directly predicts missing data, the network learns a compact complex-valued Hankel subspace operator. Reconstruction is performed over the original k-space variables using a conjugategradient solver with hard data consistency. This design separates structural learning in the Hankel domain from data consistency in the physical domain: the former exploits multi-coil and local Hankel correlations, while the latter solves over unacquired degrees of freedom. We provide theoretical analyses of physicalgroup splitting and multiplicity normalization, and establish positive definiteness, uniqueness, hard data consistency, and a finite-step conjugate-gradient error bound for the system. On fastMRI brain data with three contrasts and three sampling masks, HSSRecon achieves competitive peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity, and normalized mean squared error across six aggregated conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11560