Contrastive Learning

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Overview

Contrastive learning teaches a model which examples should have similar representations and which should be distinct, often using different views of the same item as positive pairs. Common approaches include InfoNCE methods such as SimCLR and MoCo, supervised and prototype-based losses, hard-negative mining, and CLIP-style alignment across modalities. These representations support classification, retrieval, and transfer when labels are scarce, across images, language, time series, graphs, and scientific data. A central challenge is choosing positives and negatives that capture useful invariances without treating semantically related examples as negatives or discarding information needed for downstream tasks; theory also studies representation collapse, geometry, and generalization.

Latest papers

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322 papers37 papers in the last four weeks, up 3% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Beyond Expression Similarity: Contrastive Learning Recovers Functional Gene Associations from Protein Interaction Structure

    Mar 21, 2026Jason DuryContrastive LearningBioinformatics

    Eridos AI

  2. Unsupervised Contrastive Learning for Efficient and Robust Spectral Shape Matching

    Mar 19, 2026Feifan Luo, Hongyang ChenFunctional MapsNon-Rigid Shape Correspondence

    College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China · Research Center for Data Hub and Security, Zhejiang Lab, Hangzhou 311121, China

  3. Multiscale Switch for Semi-Supervised and Contrastive Learning in Medical Ultrasound Image Segmentation

    Mar 19, 2026Jingguo Qu, Xinyang Han, Yao Pu +8Semi-Supervised Medical Image SegmentationUltrasound Image Segmentation

    Department of Health Technology and Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China · Centre for Smart Health and School of Nursing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China · Department of Imaging and Interventional Radiology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

  4. LLM-Enhanced Energy Contrastive Learning for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Text-Attributed Graphs

    Mar 19, 2026Xiaoxu Ma, Dong Li, Minglai Shao +2OOD DetectionText-Attributed Graph Learning

    School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, China · Department of Computer Science, Baylor University, USA · Key Lab of Education Blockchain and Intelligent Technology, Ministry of Education, Guangxi Normal University, China +1

  5. MedSAD-CLIP: Supervised CLIP with Token-Patch Cross-Attention for Medical Anomaly Detection and Segmentation

    Mar 18, 2026Thuy Truong Tran, Minh Kha Do, Phuc Nguyen Duy +1Medical Image Anomaly DetectionMedical VLMs

    Singapore Management University · La Trobe University · Vietnam National University, Hanoi

  6. Pathology-Aware Multi-View Contrastive Learning for Patient-Independent ECG Reconstruction

    Mar 18, 2026Youssef Youssef, Jitin SinglaMulti-View Contrastive LearningElectrocardiography

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee 247667, India · Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee 247667, India

  7. Pixel-level Counterfactual Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Segmentation

    Mar 17, 2026Marceau Lafargue-Hauret, Raghav Mehta, Fabio De Sousa Ribeiro +2Medical Image SegmentationContrastive Learning

    Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK

  8. SpikeCLR: Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Few-Shot Event-Based Vision using Spiking Neural Networks

    Mar 17, 2026Maxime Vaillant, Axel Carlier, Lai Xing Ng +2Self-Supervised Visual Representation LearningEvent-Based Vision

    CNRS, IPAL IRL 2955, Singapore · Université de Toulouse, IRIT, France · Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore +2

  9. TopoCL: Topological Contrastive Learning for Medical Imaging

    Mar 15, 2026Guangyu Meng, Pengfei Gu, Peixian Liang +3Medical Image Representation LearningContrastive Learning

    Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame · The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley · Dept. of IT, Analytics, and Operations, University of Notre Dame

  10. Maximizing Incremental Information Entropy for Contrastive Learning

    Mar 13, 2026Jiansong Zhang, Zhuoqin Yang, Xu Wu +3Contrastive LearningSelf-Supervised Visual Representation Learning

    School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China · Computer Vision Institute, School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China · School of Engineering, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou, China +1

  11. Asymptotic and Finite-Time Guarantees for Langevin-Based Temperature Annealing in InfoNCE

    Mar 13, 2026Faris ChaudhryContrastive Learning

    Imperial College London, United Kingdom

  12. Less is More: Compact-Token Masked Feature Prediction for Skeleton Representation Learning

    Mar 11, 2026Jeonghyeok Do, Yun Chen, Geunhyuk Youk +1Representation LearningMotion Representation Learning

    Information & Electronics Research Institute, KAIST · School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST

  13. BrainSCL: Subtype-Guided Contrastive Learning for Brain Disorder Diagnosis

    Mar 11, 2026Xiaolong Li, Guiliang Guo, Guangqi Wen +6Brain Disorder ClassificationContrastive Learning

    Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China · School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China · AiShiWeiLai AI Research, Beijing, China +2

  14. From Representation to Clusters: A Contrastive Learning Approach for Attributed Hypergraph Clustering

    Mar 10, 2026Li Ni, Shuaikang Zeng, Lin Mu +1Hypergraph LearningDeep Clustering

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hefei, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

  15. M3GCLR: Multi-View Mini-Max Infinite Skeleton-Data Game Contrastive Learning For Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

    Mar 10, 2026Yanshan Li, Ke Ma, Miaomiao Wei +1Skeleton-Based Action RecognitionContrastive Learning

    Shenzhen University, the Institute of Intelligence Information Processing, and the Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Shenzhen 518000, China

  16. MedKCO: Medical Vision-Language Pretraining via Knowledge-Driven Cognitive Orchestration

    Mar 10, 2026Chenran Zhang, Ruiqi Wu, Tao Zhou +1Medical VLMsVision-Language Pretraining

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China · Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications, Ministry of Education, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China

  17. Efficient Chest X-ray Representation Learning via Semantic-Partitioned Contrastive Learning

    Mar 7, 2026Wangyu Feng, Shawn Young, Lijian XuMedical Image Representation LearningSelf-Supervised Pre-Training

    Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, Shenzhen, China

  18. Optimizing Multi-Modal Models for Image-Based Shape Retrieval: The Role of Pre-Alignment and Hard Contrastive Learning

    Mar 7, 2026Paul Julius Kühn, Cedric Spengler, Michael Weinmann +23D Shape RetrievalCross-Modal Retrieval

    Fraunhofer IGD, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany · Delft University of Technology, 2628 CD Delft, Netherlands

  19. A Contrastive Fewshot RGBD Traversability Segmentation Framework for Indoor Robotic Navigation

    Mar 6, 2026Qiyuan An, Tuan Dang, Fillia MakedonIndoor Robot NavigationSemantic Segmentation

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, 1225 West Mitchell, Arlington, TX 76019, USA · Uber, Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA · Cognitive Robotics Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA

  20. ProtAlign: Contrastive learning paradigm for Sequence and structure alignment

    Mar 6, 2026Aditya Ranganath, Hasin Us Sami, Kowshik Thopalli +2Cross-Modal AlignmentProtein Representation Learning

    Center for Applied Scientific Computing, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

  21. Breaking the Geometric Bottleneck: Contrastive Expansion in Asymmetric Cross-Modal Distillation

    Mar 5, 2026Kabir ThayaniKnowledge DistillationContrastive Learning

    Independent Researcher · India

  22. Guiding Diffusion-based Reconstruction with Contrastive Signals for Balanced Visual Representation

    Mar 5, 2026Boyu Han, Qianqian Xu, Shilong Bao +4Visual Representation LearningSelf-Supervised Visual Representation Learning

    State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS · School of Computer Science and Tech., University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence +3

  23. DQE-CIR: Distinctive Query Embeddings through Learnable Attribute Weights and Target Relative Negative Sampling in Composed Image Retrieval

    Mar 4, 2026Geon Park, Ji-Hoon Park, Seong-Whan LeeComposed Image RetrievalFine-Grained Image Retrieval

    Department of Artificial Intelligence, Korea University, Seoul, 02841, Republic of Korea

  24. ACDC: Adaptive Curriculum Planning with Dynamic Contrastive Control for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 2, 2026Xuerui Wang, Guangyu Ren, Tianhong Dai +4Goal-Conditioned RLGoal-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation

    Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA · Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China · Applied Computing, UK

  25. Predictive Reasoning with Augmented Anomaly Contrastive Learning for Compositional Visual Relations

    Mar 1, 2026Chengtai Li, Yuting He, Jianfeng Ren +4Compositional ReasoningVisual Reasoning

    School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo 315100, China. · Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Ningbo institute of materials technology and engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. · School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Link, 639798 Singapore.

  26. InfoNCE Induces Gaussian Distribution

    Feb 27, 2026Roy Betser, Eyal Gofer, Meir Yossef Levi +1Contrastive LearningRepresentation Learning

    Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

  27. Pseudo Contrastive Learning for Diagram Comprehension in Multimodal Models

    Feb 27, 2026Hiroshi SasakiContrastive LearningMultimodal Contrastive Learning

    The Japan Research Institute, Limited

  28. CWM: Contrastive World Models for Action Feasibility Learning in Embodied Agent Pipelines

    Feb 25, 2026Chayan BanerjeeEmbodied AIContrastive Learning

    School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics, Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

  29. Disentangling Shared and Target-Enriched Topics via Background-Contrastive Non-negative Matrix Factorization

    Feb 25, 2026Yixuan Li, Archer Y. Yang, Yue LiNon-Negative Matrix FactorizationDisentangled Representation Learning

    Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada · Mila – Quebec AI Institute, Montreal, QC, Canada · School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

  30. CRCC: Contrast-Based Robust Cross-Subject and Cross-Site Representation Learning for EEG

    Feb 22, 2026Xiaobin Wong, Zhonghua Zhao, Haoran Guo +5Cross-Dataset GeneralizationCross-Domain Generalization

    Tsinghua Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences +6