Asymmetric Within-Document Predictive Learning for Scientific Document Representation
TL;DR
This work proposes SciJEPA, a citation-free framework that learns through asymmetric within-document prediction: title and abstract representations are used to predict method representations, and method representations are used to predict conclusion representations.
Abstract
We study predictive pretraining for scientific document representation using the discourse structure of papers. We propose SciJEPA, a citation-free framework that learns through asymmetric within-document prediction: title and abstract representations are used to predict method representations, and method representations are used to predict conclusion representations. Experiments on RELISH, high-influence citation, SciDocs, and cite prediction show that plain predictive training is viable but weaker than a controlled contrastive baseline using the same section pairs. Adding Sliced Isotropic Gaussian Regularization (SIGReg) substantially improves performance and narrows this gap. The effect of regularization is task-dependent: moderate SIGReg helps fine-grained ranking, while stronger regularization can weaken local alignment. We further show that different encoding branches support different retrieval regimes. These results position within-document predictive learning as a promising citation-free complement for scientific document representation, provided that embedding geometry is carefully controlled.
