arxivcs.LG2026-06-29
Predictive Objectives Discard Exogenous Control-Relevant Features: A Controlled Mechanistic Study
Joint-embedding predictive (JEPA-style) objectives learn representations by predicting future latents. In doing so they can discard features that are exogenous (uncontrollable by the agent) yet control-relevant, even when those features are trivially encodable. This occurs becaus…