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. MoBind: Motion Binding for Fine-Grained IMU-Video Pose Alignment

    Feb 22, 2026Duc Duy Nguyen, Tat-Jun Chin, Minh HoaiCross-Modal Representation LearningCross-Modal Alignment

    Australian Institute for Machine Learning, Adelaide University, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia

  2. Tracing Copied Pixels and Regularizing Patch Affinity in Copy Detection

    Feb 19, 2026Yichen Lu, Siwei Nie, Minlong Lu +3Image Forgery DetectionContrastive Learning

    Ant Group, China

  3. jina-embeddings-v5-text: Task-Targeted Embedding Distillation

    Feb 17, 2026Mohammad Kalim Akram, Saba Sturua, Nastia Havriushenko +4Text Embedding ModelsKnowledge Distillation

    Jina by Elastic

  4. BindCLIP: A Unified Contrastive-Generative Representation Learning Framework for Virtual Screening

    Feb 16, 2026Anjie Qiao, Zhen Wang, Yaliang Li +2Virtual ScreeningMolecular Representation Learning

    Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China · Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China

  5. MB-DSMIL-CL-PL: Scalable Weakly Supervised Ovarian Cancer Subtype Classification and Localisation Using Contrastive and Prototype Learning with Frozen Patch Features

    Feb 16, 2026Marcus Jenkins, Jasenka Mazibrada, Bogdan Leahu +1Histopathology Image ClassificationCancer Subtype Classification

    School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk, NR4 7TJ, UK · Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, Norwich, Norfolk, NR4 7UY, UK

  6. BHyGNN+: Unsupervised Representation Learning for Heterophilic Hypergraphs

    Feb 16, 2026Tianyi Ma, Yiyue Qian, Zehong Wang +3Hypergraph LearningHypergraph Neural Networks

    ♠University of Notre Dame · ♣Amazon GenAI · ♦University of Connecticut

  7. Cross-Sectional Asset Retrieval via Future-Aligned Soft Contrastive Learning

    Feb 11, 2026Hyeongmin Lee, Chanyeol Choi, Jihoon Kwon +8Contrastive LearningInformation Retrieval

    Seoul National University of Science and Technology Seoul, Republic of Korea · LinqAlpha Cambridge, MA, United States · Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA, United States +7

  8. Enhancing IMU-Based Online Handwriting Recognition via Contrastive Learning with Zero Inference Overhead

    Feb 4, 2026Jindong Li, Dario Zanca, Vincent Christlein +4Contrastive LearningOnline Handwriting Recognition

    Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning, Munich, Germany · STABILO International GmbH, Heroldsberg, Germany +2

  9. The Geometric Mechanics of Contrastive Representation Learning: Alignment Potentials, Entropic Dispersion, and Cross-modal Divergence

    Jan 27, 2026Yichao Cai, Zhen Zhang, Yuhang Liu +1Cross-Modal LearningContrastive Learning

    Australian Institute for Machine Learning, Adelaide University · Responsible AI Research Centre

  10. Mitigating Bias in Automated Essay Scoring for ESL Learners via Contrastive Learning

    Jan 23, 2026Kevin Fan, Eric YunContrastive LearningEducational Assessment

    Georgia Institute of Technology · Georgia State University

  11. Weighted Contrastive Learning for Anomaly-Aware Time-Series Forecasting

    Dec 8, 2025Joel Ekstrand, Tor Mattsson, Zahra Taghiyarrenani +3Multivariate Time Series ForecastingContrastive Learning

    Center for Applied Intelligent Systems Research, Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden · Mikael Linden Consulting AB, Stockholm, Sweden

  12. Patent Representation Learning via Self-supervision

    Nov 3, 2025You Zuo, Kim Gerdes, Éric de la Clergerie +1Contrastive LearningRepresentation Learning

    ALMAnaCH · Inria Paris, France · Questel Paris, France +2

  13. Consistent Zero-Shot Imitation with Contrastive Goal Inference

    Oct 20, 2025Kathryn Wantlin, Chongyi Zheng, Benjamin EysenbachContrastive LearningReinforcement Learning

    Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.

  14. Symmetry-Aware Transformer Training for Automated Planning

    Aug 11, 2025Markus Fritzsche, Elliot Gestrin, Jendrik SeippContrastive LearningTransformer

    Linköping University, Sweden

  15. SynSeg: Feature Synergy for Multi-Category Contrastive Learning in End-to-End Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

    Aug 8, 2025Weichen Zhang, Kebin Liu, Fan Dang +3Contrastive LearningWeakly Supervised Image Segmentation

    Tsinghua University, 100084, Beijing, China · Beijing Jiaotong University, 100044, Beijing, China

  16. Divergence-Based Similarity Function for Multi-View Contrastive Learning

    Jul 9, 2025Jaehyoung Jeon, Cheolsu Lim, Myungjoo KangContrastive LearningMulti-View Learning

    Department of Mathematics, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea · Research Institute of Mathematics, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

  17. MSA-UNet3+: Multi-Scale Attention UNet3+ with New Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Loss for Coronary DSA Image Segmentation

    Apr 7, 2025Rayan Merghani Ahmed, Adnan Iltaf, Mohamed Elmanna +5Contrastive LearningMedical Imaging

    Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shenzhen, 518055, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Beijing, 101408, China · Department of Biomedical Engineering and Systems, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Cairo, 12613, Egypt +2

  18. SynCo: Synthetic Hard Negatives for Contrastive Visual Representation Learning

    Oct 3, 2024Nikos Giakoumoglou, Tania StathakiContrastive LearningHard Negative Mining

    Imperial College London London, UK, SW7 2AZ

  19. Beyond Spectral Decomposition: Bayesian Contrastive Learning and its Non-negative Formulation via Factor Analysis

    Jul 31, 2024Zhibin Duan, Tiansheng Wen, Yifei Wang +3Contrastive LearningDisentangled Representation Learning

    Xidian University · MIT CSAIL · The University of Texas at Austin

  20. Relational Representation Distillation

    Jul 16, 2024Nikos Giakoumoglou, Tania StathakiContrastive LearningRelational Knowledge Distillation

    Imperial College London London, UK, SW7 2AZ

  21. A Transformer-Based Contrastive Learning Approach for Few-Shot Sign Language Recognition

    Apr 5, 2022Silvan Ferreira, Esdras Costa, Marcio Dahia +1Contrastive LearningSign Language Recognition

    CESAR · Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Natal, Brazil · Lenovo

  22. Domain Knowledge-Informed Self-Supervised Representations for Workout Form Assessment

    Feb 28, 2022Paritosh Parmar, Amol Gharat, Helge RhodinContrastive LearningAction Quality Assessment

    University of British Columbia · FlexAI Inc.