# CI-JEPA: A Counterfactual Analysis of Latent Representations in Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures for Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05043 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05043/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2026.

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

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01644/) (2016)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [Noise or Signal: The Role of Image Backgrounds in Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09994/) (2020)
- [Counterfactual Visual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07451/) (2019)
- [Generating Visual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08507/) (2016)
- [Interventional Causal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11924/) (2022)
- [CausalVAE: Structured Causal Disentanglement in Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08697/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised visual representation learning learns useful features without manual annotations during representation training. The image-based joint-embedding predictive architecture (I-JEPA) predicts latent representations of masked image regions, but its objective does not explicitly model responses to specified visual interventions. We introduce CI-JEPA, a counterfactual intervention-aware extension that learns to predict the representation change Delta Z = ZCF - Z between an original image and a modified counterpart. We assess representation robustness through selective sensitivity: stronger responses to task-relevant semantic changes than to nuisance changes. Experiments on Flowers102 use flower-center occlusion as a candidate semantic intervention and background blur and tint as candidate nuisance interventions. With frozen-encoder linear probing, CI-JEPA achieves a best validation accuracy of 78.14%, compared with 77.55% for both the pretrained ViT-B/16 and the I-JEPA baseline, a gain of 0.59 percentage points. The reported mean L2 representation changes are 4.42 for center occlusion, 3.48 for background tint, and 2.83 for background blur. This ordering is consistent with relative semantic selectivity for the evaluated interventions, rather than complete nuisance invariance. The accuracy comparison is complementary and does not establish improved robustness over the baselines. These controlled image modifications provide a framework for studying intervention-induced changes in JEPA representations; they do not establish causal feature discovery or robustness to all visual changes.