Human-JEPA: A Human-Centric Vision Model that Perceives and Anticipates

Machines that understand humans should perceive the present and anticipate the future. Existing human-centric vision model are pretrained on human images, set the state of the art in static dense perception, so motion and anticipation are out of reach. Here we present Human-JEPA, a human-centric vision model trained on video by anchored forecasting: dense targets are pinned to a frozen copy of the initialization, preventing a silent collapse of dense perception, and block masks are replaced by a pure past-to-future split, avoiding a five-point action tax and a seventeen-point re-identification collapse. Under frozen probes, Human-JEPA leads the pixel-anchored specialists on pose and person re-identification at 2.7 times fewer parameters, conceding high-resolution dense parsing, and its released predictor head is the first that does not degrade anticipation. A single safely adapted model thus serves both halves of understanding humans.

A Matter of Time: Towards a General Theory of Agency

Agency is often invoked in research on philosophy, biology, and cognitive science without a clear account of how it originates from material organization. Building on temporally parametrized (F, A)-systems, this paper develops a graded organizational theory of agency grounded in relational biology, physical biosemiotics, and process ontology. We argue that self-referential closure cannot be adequately conceived outside time: once the constitutive processes of a semantically closed organization are associated with distinct characteristic timescales, the organization unfolds into an out-of-sync dependency structure that can be formally redescribed as a history-dependent, revisable Asynchronous Dynamic Bayesian Network. This move allows for a principled distinction between autonomy, goal-directedness, agency, and open-endedness. Autonomy arises from precarious closure to efficient causation under material openness; goal-directedness from the maintenance of viability-supporting organization; agency appears when such organization acquires an endogenous anticipatory structure that selectively modulates organism-environment coupling in light of possible futures; open-endedness begins when this anticipatory organization can reconstruct its own future space of possibilities. Our framework reconciles Rosennean anticipation with organizational closure, restricts Markov blankets and active inference to derived formal redescriptions rather than first principles, and reinterprets computational enactivism in non-Fristonian terms. By deriving weaker temporalized organizations, our contribution outlines a hierarchy from proto-agential chemical systems to fully semantically closed agents, with implications for multicellular organisms, synthetic lifeforms, and neuroscience.