arxivcs.LGcs.AI2026-07-20
Beyond Objective Expressivity: Geometry Preservation in Multimodal Contrastive Learning
Tillmann Rheude, Roland Eils, Benjamin Wild
Contrastive learning is increasingly moving toward settings with three or more modalities instead of image-text pairs. Yet, extending models from pairwise to higher-order multimodal alignment can introduce optimization and representation challenges. We identify encoder Jacobian c…