2026
UniCon: Unified Framework for Efficient Contrastive Alignment via Kernels
ICLR 2026poster
Contrastive objectives power state-of-the-art multimodal models, but their training remains slow, relying on long stochastic optimization. We propose a Unified Framework for Efficient Contrastive Alignment via Kernels (UniCon), which spans linear and nonlinear encoders as well as one-to-one and many…