# Steerable Directions (Dials)

On two-dimensional decaying Navier–Stokes flow, three pre-registered studies separate three properties often conflated as evidence that a latent has learned physics: decodability, prominence and steerability. A joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) beats an untrained network of the same architecture on three probe targets yet fails the pre-registered criteria for organizing its latent around fluid quantities; autoencoders that render the field make enstrophy prominent in their slowest unsupervised directions, and adding VICReg lowers that prominence in every comparison while raising linear decodability; a routed design yields a label-free loudness dial in all 8 trained models and a spectral-shape dial in only 3 of 5 fresh seeds, below the pre-registered bar of 4.

On two-dimensional decaying Navier–Stokes flow, three pre-registered studies separate three properties often conflated as evidence that a latent has learned physics: decodability, prominence and steerability. A joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) beats an untrained network of the same architecture on three probe targets yet fails the pre-registered criteria for organizing its latent around fluid quantities; autoencoders that render the field make enstrophy prominent in their slowest unsupervised directions, and adding VICReg lowers that prominence in every comparison while raising linear decodability; a routed design yields a label-free loudness dial in all 8 trained models and a spectral-shape dial in only 3 of 5 fresh seeds, below the pre-registered bar of 4.