# SiamJEPA: On the Role of Siamese Student Encoders in JEPA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04044 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04044/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09985/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08471/) (2024)
- [Masked Siamese Networks for Label-Efficient Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07141/) (2022)
- [Context Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03026/) (2022)
- [LeJEPA: Provable and Scalable Self-Supervised Learning Without the Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08544/) (2025)
- [Stochastic Video Generation with a Learned Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07687/) (2018)
- [Siamese Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14344/) (2023)
- [Efficient Image Pre-Training with Siamese Cropped Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17823/) (2024)
- [VISReg: Variance-Invariance-Sketching Regularization for JEPA training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02572/) (2026)
- [Visual Representation Learning with Stochastic Frame Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07398/) (2024)
- [SkyJEPA: Learning Long-Horizon World Models for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Control of Quadrotors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23444/) (2026)
- [You Don't Need Strong Assumptions: Visual Representation Learning via Temporal Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15956/) (2026)
- [DSeq-JEPA: Discriminative Sequential Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17354/) (2025)
- [PhiNets: Brain-inspired Non-contrastive Learning Based on Temporal Prediction Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14650/) (2024)
- [Brain-Inspired Stochastic Joint Embedding Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11129/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have emerged as a promising framework for self-supervised representation learning by predicting latent embeddings of masked regions rather than reconstructing pixels. Existing JEPA methods typically employ a single student encoder, leaving the role of Siamese student encoders largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose Siamese JEPA (SiamJEPA), a JEPA framework with masked Siamese student encoders and an exponential moving average (EMA) teacher, which can also be viewed as a JEPA formulation of the brain-inspired representation learning model PhiNet. We further introduce Random Shuffle Teacher (RST), which removes spatial correspondence in teacher targets to encourage semantic patch representations, and develop an RST-based semantic-to-spatial curriculum. Experiments on ImageNet show that Siamese student encoders effectively regularize the JEPA objective, improving representation separability and accelerating early-stage learning. Moreover, under RST, stronger Siamese regularization substantially increases class-discriminative information in individual patch tokens, suggesting that the semantic bias arises from the interaction between RST and the Siamese objective rather than from shuffling alone. SiamJEPA consistently outperforms comparable single-encoder JEPA variants under limited training budgets. With RST-based curriculum learning and a ViT-Base backbone, SiamJEPA achieves 74.2% linear-probing accuracy after 450 epochs using a substantially simpler masking strategy, compared with I-JEPA (72.9%) and DSeq-JEPA (73.5%) after 600 epochs. These results demonstrate that Siamese student encoders provide an effective inductive bias for predictive representation learning and can be further enhanced through semantic-to-spatial curriculum learning. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/oist/SiamJEPA.