Implement CLIP Contrastive Loss

Quick Overview

This question evaluates understanding and implementation of contrastive representation learning concepts—specifically similarity matrices, symmetric image-text contrastive loss, normalization, temperature scaling, and label construction—testing competency in building losses for embedding alignment in the Machine Learning domain.

Implement CLIP Contrastive Loss

Company: Uber

Role: Machine Learning Engineer

Category: Machine Learning

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Technical Screen

Given a minibatch of paired image and text embeddings, implement the symmetric contrastive loss used in CLIP-style image-text representation learning. You are given: - `image_embeddings`: a tensor of shape `(batch_size, embedding_dim)`. - `text_embeddings`: a tensor of shape `(batch_size, embedding_dim)`. - The `i`-th image corresponds to the `i`-th text. Compute a similarity matrix between every image embedding and every text embedding. Then compute: - Image-to-text loss: cross entropy over each image row, where the correct class for row `i` is text `i`. - Text-to-image loss: cross entropy over each text row, equivalently cross entropy on the transposed similarity matrix, where the correct class for row `i` is image `i`. - Final loss: the average of the two losses. Implement this loss function and explain any important details such as normalization, temperature scaling, and label construction.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates understanding and implementation of contrastive representation learning concepts—specifically similarity matrices, symmetric image-text contrastive loss, normalization, temperature scaling, and label construction—testing competency in building losses for embedding alignment in the Machine Learning domain.

|Home/Machine Learning/Uber
Uber logo
Uber
Apr 3, 2026, 12:00 AM
mediumMachine Learning EngineerTechnical ScreenMachine Learning
15
0

Given a minibatch of paired image and text embeddings, implement the symmetric contrastive loss used in CLIP-style image-text representation learning.

You are given:

  • image_embeddings : a tensor of shape (batch_size, embedding_dim) .
  • text_embeddings : a tensor of shape (batch_size, embedding_dim) .
  • The i -th image corresponds to the i -th text.

Compute a similarity matrix between every image embedding and every text embedding. Then compute:

  • Image-to-text loss: cross entropy over each image row, where the correct class for row i is text i .
  • Text-to-image loss: cross entropy over each text row, equivalently cross entropy on the transposed similarity matrix, where the correct class for row i is image i .
  • Final loss: the average of the two losses.

Implement this loss function and explain any important details such as normalization, temperature scaling, and label construction.

Loading comments...