{"paper":{"title":"Elucidating the Role of Feature Normalization in IJEPA","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Adam Colton","submitted_at":"2025-08-04T18:52:17Z","abstract_excerpt":"In the standard image joint embedding predictive architecture (IJEPA), features at the output of the teacher encoder are layer normalized (LN) before serving as a distillation target for the student encoder and predictor. We propose that this feature normalization disrupts the natural energy hierarchy of visual tokens, where high-energy tokens (those with larger L2 norms) encode semantically important image regions. LN forces all features to have identical L2 norms, effectively equalizing their energies and preventing the model from prioritizing semantically rich regions. We find that IJEPA mo"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2508.02829","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2508.02829/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}