Beyond Objective Expressivity: Geometry Preservation in Multimodal Contrastive Learning
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 conditioning as a key factor in trimodal contrastive learning: poorly conditioned encoders exhibit collapsing or amplified singular-value spectra, leading to exploding Jacobian condition numbers and degraded multimodal alignment. We introduce geometry-preserving encoders (GPEs) by directly conditioning the Jacobian through regularization and demonstrating that simple modifications like LeakyReLU activations and res...
| Authors | Tillmann Rheude, Roland Eils, Benjamin Wild |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 20 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 July 2026 |
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