Symmetry

We prove that JEPA, or any world model trained under finite computation, will always break rules about the universe that no human would struggle with (symmetries). Here's why: To see why, imagine drawing the number 6 on the floor. Stand on opposite sides and argue whether it's a 6 or a 9. Someone stands overhead and makes a 69 joke. Physics solved this: conserve a universal answer regardless of where you stand. That's conservation of symmetry. A world model trained under log loss from one side of the room will confidently say 6. Train it from the other side, it says 9. Train it from both sides with position encoded, it learns "if standing here, 6; if standing there, 9", which is better compression than learning "ambiguous shape, need more context." The symmetry-breaking representation wins on log loss because it's cheaper than representing the genuine invariance. The optimizer is doing exactly what you asked it to. The uncomfortable implication: world models trained this way aren't learning the world's symmetries. They're learning whatever compressed representation minimizes codelength given the architecture they've got. Most of the "scaling will solve it" discourse implicitly assumes that enough data and compute will recover true invariances. We demonstrate mathematically that the objective itself doesn't want that unless you make invariance cheap in the model description. More data gives you more n, which makes the right side of the threshold bigger, not smaller. Scaling makes it worse, not better. A[~G]I. We provide Mezzanine, a toolkit that fixes these failures one symmetry at a time by distilling invariant representations from orbit-averaged teachers. Pick any model of reality, identify a broken symmetry (which we prove always exists), patch it, and the student performs identically to or better than the teacher, which was breaking that symmetry to compress. It works, it's straightforward, and it outperforms full "world models" trained on scale and ignorance. But it's a patch, not a cure: you have to know the symmetry, and no general fix can ever exist. Toolkit link in the comments, paper next week. Thank you Maggie Chlon for the insane effort put into validating the symmetries we looked at! Mezzanine toolkit: https://lnkd.in/eDy8Y3-R Thank you Nell Watson and Survival and Flourishing Corp for funding our efforts and making all this possible ❤️ | 177 comments on LinkedIn