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Michael Rabbat

Associate Industry Member
Research Scientist, AMI Labs
Research Topics
Distributed Systems
Optimization
Representation Learning
LinkedIn

Biography

Mike Rabbat is an affiliate member of Mila and Co-Founder and VP World Models at Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI). His research interests include efficient and robust representation learning, self-supervised learning, and model-based planning and control. He is also interested in optimization for efficient model training.

Publications

Interpreting Physics in Video World Models: Toward Safe Embodied AI
Sonia Joseph
Quentin Garrido
Randall Balestriero
Matthew Kowal
Thomas Fel
Shahab Bakhtiari
Blake Aaron Richards
Michael Rabbat
Physical AI agents acting in the real world fail differently from language models: a misjudgment of trajectory, force, or contact can have i… (see more)mmediate and potentially irreversible consequences. As video world models are increasingly deployed as the perception and dynamics layer of such agents, understanding what physical structure they actually represent internally be- comes a precondition for trustworthy deployment. Yet today these models are largely studied as black boxes, evaluated only through behavioral benchmarks. We argue that this should change: world models can be opened up, and the latent variables they encode can be measured, interpreted, and eventually controlled. We take a first step in this direction across two state-of-the-art video encoders (V-JEPA 2 and VideoMAE-v2), using layerwise probing, subspace geometry, patch-level decoding, and targeted attention ablations. We identify a sharp intermediate-depth transition we call the Physics Emergence Zone, at which physical variables become accessible. Decomposing motion into explicit variables, we find that scalar quantities such as speed and acceleration are available from early layers onwards, whereas motion direction becomes accessible only at the Physics Emergence Zone, encoded as a high-dimensional circular population code that requires coordinated multi-feature intervention to steer. These findings argue against compact, reusable latent physics state and in favor of distributed, task-specific representations supported by a shared local-attention circuit. We discuss implications for safe deploy- ment of video world models in embodied physical AI, including why intermediate-layer features, multi-feature monitors, and the local-attention circuit at the Physics Emergence Zone are natural targets for runtime verification.
2026-07-19
SPAI @ International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence - European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture
Mahmoud Assran
Quentin Duval
Ishan Misra
Piotr Bojanowski
Pascal Vincent
Michael Rabbat
Yann Lecun
Nicolas Ballas
This paper demonstrates an approach for learning highly semantic image representations without relying on hand-crafted data-augmentations. W… (see more)e introduce the Image-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (I-JEPA), a non-generative approach for self-supervised learning from images. The idea behind I-JEPA is simple: from a single context block, predict the representations of various target blocks in the same image. A core design choice to guide I-JEPA towards producing semantic representations is the masking strategy; specifically, it is crucial to (a) sample target blocks with sufficiently large scale (semantic), and to (b) use a sufficiently informative (spatially distributed) context block. Empirically, when combined with Vision Transformers, we find I-JEPA to be highly scalable. For instance, we train a ViT-Huge/14 on ImageNet using 16 A100 GPUs in under 72 hours to achieve strong downstream performance across a wide range of tasks, from linear classification to object counting and depth prediction.
2023-06-16
2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org