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. BioHiCL: Hierarchical Multi-Label Contrastive Learning for Biomedical Retrieval with MeSH Labels

    Apr 17, 2026Mengfei Lan, Lecheng Zheng, Halil KilicogluContrastive LearningHierarchical Representation Learning

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2. ID and Graph View Contrastive Learning with Multi-View Attention Fusion for Sequential Recommendation

    Apr 15, 2026Xiaofan Zhou, Kyumin LeeMulti-View Contrastive LearningSequential Recommendation

    Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, USA

  3. CLIP Architecture for Abdominal CT Image-Text Alignment and Zero-Shot Learning: Investigating Batch Composition and Data Scaling

    Apr 15, 2026Shivika, Kartik Bose, Pankaj GuptaMedical VLMs3D Medical Imaging

    Department of Radiodiagnosis and Imaging, PGIMER, Chandigarh, India-160012

  4. Training-Free Test-Time Contrastive Learning for Large Language Models

    Apr 15, 2026Kaiwen Zheng, Kai Zhou, Jinwu Hu +3Test-Time AdaptationLanguage Model Robustness

    South China University of Technology · Pazhou Laboratory

  5. Concrete Jungle: Towards Concreteness Paved Contrastive Negative Mining for Compositional Understanding

    Apr 14, 2026Eun Woo Im, Dhruv Madhwal, Vivek GuptaCompositional Reasoning in VLMsVLM Reasoning

    Arizona State University

  6. CoRe-ECG: Advancing Self-Supervised Representation Learning for 12-Lead ECG via Contrastive and Reconstructive Synergy

    Apr 13, 2026Zehao Qin, Xiaojian Lin, Ping Zhang +6Electrocardiogram Representation LearningRepresentation Learning

    Department of Electronic Engineering, Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518071, PR China · Department of Cardiology, Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, School of Clinical Medicine, Tsinghua Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 102218, PR China · Department of Anesthesiology, National Cancer Center/National Clinical Research Center for Cancer/Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, 100021, PR China +3

  7. Beyond Statistical Co-occurrence: Unlocking Intrinsic Semantics for Tabular Data Clustering

    Apr 13, 2026Mingjie Zhao, Yunfan Zhang, Yiqun Zhang +1ClusteringDeep Clustering

    Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China · Department of Computer Science, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

  8. STAR: Semantic-Tuned and Tail-Adaptive Retriever for Graph-Augmented Generation

    Apr 11, 2026Shuai Li, Chen Huang, Duanyu Feng +2Graph Retrieval-Augmented GenerationKnowledge Graph Question Answering

  9. Masked Contrastive Pre-Training Improves Music Audio Key Detection

    Apr 11, 2026Ori Yonay, Tracy Hammond, Tianbao YangMusic Information RetrievalAudio Representation Learning

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University

  10. Beyond Isolated Clients: Integrating Graph-Based Embeddings into Event Sequence Models

    Apr 10, 2026Harry Proshian, Nikita Severin, Sergey Nikolenko +5Self-Supervised LearningContrastive Learning

    Steklov Institute of Mathematics Saint Petersburg, Russia · Independent Researcher Belgrade, Serbia · ISP RAS Steklov Institute of Mathematics Saint Petersburg, Russia +4

  11. CLEAR: Cross-Lingual Enhancement in Alignment via Reverse-training

    Apr 7, 2026Seungyoon Lee, Minhyuk Kim, Seongtae Hong +3Multilingual IRCross-Lingual Representation Alignment

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University · Department of English Language and Literature, Kyungpook National University

  12. Probing Intrinsic Medical Task Relationships: A Contrastive Learning Perspective

    Apr 7, 2026Jonas Muth, Zdravko Marinov, Simon ReißRepresentation LearningMedical Imaging

    Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

  13. SAIL: Scene-aware Adaptive Iterative Learning for Long-Tail Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Vehicles

    Apr 6, 2026Bin Rao, Haicheng Liao, Chengyue Wang +3Trajectory PredictionVehicle Trajectory Prediction

    State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China · State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City and Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China · Department of Automotive Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China +2

  14. Spatially-Weighted CLIP for Street-View Geo-localization

    Apr 6, 2026Ting Han, Fengjiao Li, Chunsong Chen +3Geospatial Representation LearningVisual Place Recognition

    School of Geospatial Engineering and Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai, China · School of System Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China

  15. UniSpector: Towards Universal Open-set Defect Recognition via Spectral-Contrastive Visual Prompting

    Apr 3, 2026Geonuk Kim, Minhoi Kim, Kangil Lee +5Industrial Anomaly DetectionIndustrial Inspection

    LG Energy Solution

  16. CoRe-DA: Contrastive Regression for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Surgical Skill Assessment

    Mar 31, 2026Dimitrios Anastasiou, Razvan Caramalau, Jialang Xu +6Unsupervised Domain AdaptationSurgical Video Understanding

    UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London, UK · Dept of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, University College London, UK · The Griffin Institute, UK +1

  17. TreeGaussian: Tree-Guided Cascaded Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Consistent 3D Gaussian Scene Segmentation and Understanding

    Mar 31, 2026Jingbin You, Zehao Li, Hao Jiang +83D Semantic Segmentation3D Scene Understanding

    Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, ICT · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, UCAS · Beihang University, BUAA

  18. Temporal Contrastive Transformer for Financial Crime Detection: Self-Supervised Sequence Embeddings via Predictive Contrastive Coding

    Mar 31, 2026Danny Butvinik, Yonit Marcus, Nitzan Tal +1Self-Supervised Time Series Representation LearningPredictive Representation Learning

    NICE Actimize

  19. Omni-NegCLIP: Enhancing CLIP with Front-Layer Contrastive Fine-Tuning for Comprehensive Negation Understanding

    Mar 31, 2026Jingqi XuVLM AdaptationVLM Reasoning

    University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

  20. ChemCLIP: Bridging Organic and Inorganic Anticancer Compounds Through Contrastive Learning

    Mar 30, 2026Mohamad Koohi-Moghadam, Hongzhe Sun, Hongyan Li +1Cancer Drug Response PredictionMolecular Representation Learning

    Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam Road, Hong Kong SAR, PR China · Department of Chemistry, The University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam Road, Hong Kong S.A.R., PRC

  21. ContraMap: Contrastive Uncertainty Mapping for Robot Environment Representation

    Mar 29, 2026Chi Cuong Le, Weiming ZhiUncertainty QuantificationSemantic Occupancy Mapping

    School of Computer Science and the Australian Centre for Robotics, University of Sydney, Australia

  22. Contrastive Conformal Sets

    Mar 27, 2026Yahya Alkhatib, Wee Peng TayContrastive LearningConformal Prediction

    School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  23. DiReCT: Disentangled Regularization of Contrastive Trajectories for Physics-Refined Video Generation

    Mar 26, 2026Abolfazl Meyarian, Amin Karimi Monsefi, Rajiv Ramnath +1Contrastive Flow MatchingPhysical Consistency in Video Generation

    Path Robotics, Columbus, OH, USA · The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA · University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

  24. SIGMA: Semantic Identifier Grouping for Molecular Autoregression

    Mar 26, 2026Xinyu Wang, Fei Dou, Jinbo Bi +1Molecular GenerationMolecular Representation Learning

    School of Computing, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA · Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA · Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China

  25. Contrastive Learning Boosts Deterministic and Generative Models for Weather Data

    Mar 25, 2026Nathan BaileyContrastive LearningGeospatial Representation Learning

    Supervised by Dr Sibo Cheng, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London and Dr Cesar Quilodran-Casas, The Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College London.

  26. CoRe: Joint Optimization with Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Registration

    Mar 24, 2026Eytan Kats, Christoph Grossbroehmer, Ziad Al-Haj Hemidi +3Medical Image RegistrationDeformable Image Registration

    Insitute of Medical Informatics, University of Luebeck, Luebeck, Germany

  27. Crab: Multi Layer Contrastive Supervision to Improve Speech Emotion Recognition Under Both Acted and Natural Speech Condition

    Mar 24, 2026Lucas H. Ueda, João G. T. Lima, Paula D. P. CostaContrastive LearningMultimodal Emotion Recognition

    Dept. of Computer Engineering and Automation (DCA), Faculdade de Engenharia El´etrica e de Computac¸˜ao, and are part of the AI Lab., Recod.ai, Institute of Computing, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, UNICAMP

  28. FCL-COD: Weakly Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection with Frequency-aware and Contrastive Learning

    Mar 24, 2026Jingchen Ni, Quan Zhang, Dan Jiang +3Contrastive LearningFrequency-Domain Feature Learning

    Tsinghua University · Soochow University

  29. Span Modeling for Idiomaticity and Figurative Language Detection with Span Contrastive Loss

    Mar 24, 2026Blake Matheny, Phuong Minh Nguyen, Minh Le NguyenFigurative Language UnderstandingContrastive Learning

    Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ishikawa, Japan.

  30. Chronological Contrastive Learning: Few-Shot Progression Assessment in Irreversible Diseases

    Mar 23, 2026Clemens Watzenböck, Daniel Aletaha, Michaël Deman +9Medical Image AnalysisMedical Image Representation Learning

    Computational Imaging Research Lab, Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria · Comprehensive Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria · Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine III, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria +3