Is the reconstruction loss culprit? An attempt to outperform JEPA

We evaluate JEPA-style predictive representation learning versus reconstruction-based autoencoders on a controlled "TV-series" linear dynamical system with known latent state and a single noise parameter. While an initial comparison suggests JEPA is markedly more robust to noise, further diagnostics show that autoencoder failures are strongly influenced by asymmetries in objectives and by bottleneck/component-selection effects (confirmed by PCA baselines). Motivated by these findings, we introduce gated predictive autoencoders that learn to select predictable components, mimicking the beneficial feature-selection behavior observed in over-parameterized PCA. On this toy testbed, the proposed gated model is stable across noise levels and matches or outperforms JEPA.

HyperNets and their application to learning spatial transformations

In this paper we propose a conceptual framework for higher-order artificial neural networks. The idea of higher-order networks arises naturally when a model is required to learn some group of transformations, every element of which is well-approximated by a traditional feedforward network. Thus the group as a whole can be represented as a hyper network. One of typical examples of such groups is spatial transformations. We show that the proposed framework, which we call HyperNets, is able to deal with at least two basic spatial transformations of images: rotation and affine transformation. We show that HyperNets are able not only to generalize rotation and affine transformation, but also to compensate the rotation of images bringing them into canonical forms.

Vision System for AGI: Problems and Directions

What frameworks and architectures are necessary to create a vision system for AGI? In this paper, we propose a formal model that states the task of perception within AGI. We show the role of discriminative and generative models in achieving efficient and general solution of this task, thus specifying the task in more detail. We discuss some existing generative and discriminative models and demonstrate their insufficiency for our purposes. Finally, we discuss some architectural dilemmas and open questions.