SaiVLA-JEPA: Evaluating Future Latent Prediction in JEPA-Conditioned VLA Control

Abstract

Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn to predict representations rather than pixels, offering a compact way to model how visual scenes evolve. We ask whether this predictive objective improves closed-loop control when a vision-language-action (VLA) policy already uses V-JEPA features. We call our JEPA-conditioned flow policy family SaiVLA-JEPA. It combines a vision-language model with a diffusion transformer action expert and receives features from a frozen V-JEPA encoder. Two lightweight auxiliary heads predict future representations during training and are omitted at inference, leaving the action sampler unchanged. We compare policies without JEPA features, with current JEPA conditioning, and with additional future supervision on 10,030 paired LIBERO-Plus episodes. Current JEPA conditioning reaches about 82.5% success versus 71.6% without JEPA, while future supervision provides no detectable aggregate gain at the evaluated training budget. We separately evaluate SaiVLA-JEPA-TCA, which adapts latent context, and SaiVLA-JEPA-TPA, which adapts selected parameters. The context-retry gain is a system-level result under a larger attempt budget; parameter adaptation shows no consistent advantage over the frozen policy and target controls. These results motivate assessing latent-prediction objectives through paired closed-loop rollouts rather than latent loss alone.