{"entity":{"id":"contrastive-learning","kind":"term","name":"Contrastive learning (InfoNCE)","aka":["contrastive learning","contrastive objective","contrastive alignment","InfoNCE","InfoNCE loss","contrastive pretraining"],"tldr":"Contrastive learning trains a model to pull matching pairs (two views of one slide, or one patient's RNA and protein) close together in embedding space and push non-matching pairs apart.","summary":"Contrastive methods are a branch of self-supervised learning in which the model learns by comparing positive pairs against negatives drawn from the batch (Wikipedia on self-supervised learning); the InfoNCE loss is the usual objective. It powers vision-language pathology models that align tile images with report text (CONCH) and multimodal patient models that align a patient's modalities. Its weakness is that it needs many negatives and can learn the batch rather than the biology.","asOf":"2026-09-24","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-supervised_learning","links":[{"label":"Wikipedia","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-supervised_learning"}],"tags":["cansim-terms"],"related":["cancer-ai-vocabulary"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":["self-supervised-pretraining","embedding","multimodal-fusion"],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":["Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/contrastive-learning."],"provenance":{"editedBy":"OnCo CanSim terms wave (Wikipedia summaries, standards and project pages, GDC and FDA pages, Europe PMC)","editedOn":"2026-09-24","note":"CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme"},"category":"Methods and models"},"route":"/terms/contrastive-learning/","neighbours":{"term":[{"id":"cancer-ai-vocabulary","kind":"term","name":"Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)","route":"/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/"},{"id":"embedding","kind":"term","name":"Embedding (learned representation)","route":"/terms/embedding/"},{"id":"multimodal-fusion","kind":"term","name":"Multimodal fusion (early, late, modality dropout)","route":"/terms/multimodal-fusion/"},{"id":"self-supervised-pretraining","kind":"term","name":"Self-supervised pretraining (SSL)","route":"/terms/self-supervised-pretraining/"}]}}