Daily Papers

Invariance-based and generative methods have shown a conspicuous performance for 3D self-supervised representation learning (SSRL). However, the former relies on hand-crafted data augmentations that introduce bias not universally applicable to all downstream tasks, and the latter indiscriminately reconstructs masked regions, resulting in irrelevant details being saved in the representation space. To solve the problem above, we introduce 3D-JEPA, a novel non-generative 3D SSRL framework. Specifically, we propose a multi-block sampling strategy that produces a sufficiently informative context block and several representative target blocks. We present the context-aware decoder to enhance the reconstruction of the target blocks. Concretely, the context information is fed to the decoder continuously, facilitating the encoder in learning semantic modeling rather than memorizing the context information related to target blocks. Overall, 3D-JEPA predicts the representation of target blocks from a context block using the encoder and context-aware decoder architecture. Various downstream tasks on different datasets demonstrate 3D-JEPA's effectiveness and efficiency, achieving higher accuracy with fewer pretraining epochs, e.g., 88.65% accuracy on PB_T50_RS with 150 pretraining epochs.

We present LOCATE 3D, a model for localizing objects in 3D scenes from referring expressions like "the small coffee table between the sofa and the lamp." LOCATE 3D sets a new state-of-the-art on standard referential grounding benchmarks and showcases robust generalization capabilities. Notably, LOCATE 3D operates directly on sensor observation streams (posed RGB-D frames), enabling real-world deployment on robots and AR devices. Key to our approach is 3D-JEPA, a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithm applicable to sensor point clouds. It takes as input a 3D pointcloud featurized using 2D foundation models (CLIP, DINO). Subsequently, masked prediction in latent space is employed as a pretext task to aid the self-supervised learning of contextualized pointcloud features. Once trained, the 3D-JEPA encoder is finetuned alongside a language-conditioned decoder to jointly predict 3D masks and bounding boxes. Additionally, we introduce LOCATE 3D DATASET, a new dataset for 3D referential grounding, spanning multiple capture setups with over 130K annotations. This enables a systematic study of generalization capabilities as well as a stronger model.

As opposed to human drivers, current autonomous driving systems still require vast amounts of labeled data to train. Recently, world models have been proposed to simultaneously enhance autonomous driving capabilities by improving the way these systems understand complex real-world environments and reduce their data demands via self-supervised pre-training. In this paper, we present AD-L-JEPA (aka Autonomous Driving with LiDAR data via a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), a novel self-supervised pre-training framework for autonomous driving with LiDAR data that, as opposed to existing methods, is neither generative nor contrastive. Our method learns spatial world models with a joint embedding predictive architecture. Instead of explicitly generating masked unknown regions, our self-supervised world models predict Bird's Eye View (BEV) embeddings to represent the diverse nature of autonomous driving scenes. Our approach furthermore eliminates the need to manually create positive and negative pairs, as is the case in contrastive learning. AD-L-JEPA leads to simpler implementation and enhanced learned representations. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate high-quality of embeddings learned with AD-L-JEPA. We furthermore evaluate the accuracy and label efficiency of AD-L-JEPA on popular downstream tasks such as LiDAR 3D object detection and associated transfer learning. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that AD-L-JEPA is a plausible approach for self-supervised pre-training in autonomous driving applications and is the best available approach outperforming SOTA, including most recently proposed Occupancy-MAE [1] and ALSO [2]. The source code of AD-L-JEPA is available at https://github.com/HaoranZhuExplorer/AD-L-JEPA-Release.

World models have recently re-emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, robotics, autonomous driving, and model-based reinforcement learning. However, current world model research is often dominated by three partially separated routes: 2D video-generative models that emphasize visual future synthesis, 3D scene-centric models that emphasize spatial reconstruction, and JEPA-like latent models that emphasize abstract predictive representations. While each route has made important progress, they still struggle to provide physically reliable, action-controllable, and long-horizon stable predictions for embodied decision making. In this paper, we argue that the bottleneck of world models is no longer only whether they can generate realistic futures, but whether those futures are physically meaningful and useful for action. We propose Hamiltonian World Models as a physically grounded perspective on world modeling. The key idea is to encode observations into a structured latent phase space, evolve the latent state through Hamiltonian-inspired dynamics with control, dissipation, and residual terms, decode the predicted trajectory into future observations, and use the resulting rollouts for planning. We discuss how Hamiltonian structure may improve interpretability, data efficiency, and long-horizon stability, while also noting practical challenges in real-world robotic scenes involving friction, contact, non-conservative forces, and deformable objects.