# Toward Physically Grounded JEPA World Models for Goal-Conditioned Robotic Planning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03565 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03565/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Latent predictive world models, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 11 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- World models / [Latent predictive world models](https://mlsanity.com/wm/latent-predictive-world-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (2018)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features enable Zero-shot Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04983/) (2024)
- [LeWorldModel: Stable End-to-End Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19312/) (2026)
- [LeJEPA: Provable and Scalable Self-Supervised Learning Without the Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08544/) (2025)
- [Learning from Reward-Free Offline Data: A Case for Planning with Latent Dynamics Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14819/) (2025)
- [Temporal Straightening for Latent Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12231/) (2026)
- [Sensorimotor World Models: Perception for Action via Inverse Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20104/) (2026)
- [Delta-JEPA: Learning Action-Sensitive World Models via Latent Difference Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31232/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Learning to Plan from Random Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38383/) (2026)
- [Keeping JEPA World Models Plannable When Little of the Frame Moves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03137/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Action-conditioned JEPA world models enable planning toward visually specified goals without reconstructing future pixels, yet latent prediction alone does not explicitly encourage the learned representations to retain information relevant to robotic control. We introduce an end-to-end JEPA world model that augments latent prediction with inverse dynamics (IDM) and state alignment (SA). While inverse dynamics discourages latent collapse and makes latent transitions informative of the actions that produced them, state alignment grounds consecutive representations in their associated physical configuration and motion. Across four benchmark tasks, our model attains the highest success rates on TwoRoom (100%), PushT (98%), and OGBench-Cube (87%), while performing comparably to LeWorldModel on Reacher. Our ablation further shows that adding state alignment consistently improves planning success over IDM alone across all four tasks. Although LeWorldModel, our primary baseline, attains higher average straightening on OGBench-Cube, transition-subspace analysis shows that its transition energy is concentrated in a substantially lower-dimensional subspace. Our state-aligned model exhibits a higher effective transition dimension than LeWorldModel and improves planning over IDM alone, supporting state alignment as an effective complement to inverse dynamics for robotic planning.