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Optimization Dynamics Imprint Semantic Specificity in Contrastive Embedding Norms

paperactiveprovisionaloptimization-dynamics-imprint-semantic-specificity-in-contrastive-embedding-norms-d2270cf5·1 events·first seen 15h ago

Aliases: Optimization Dynamics Imprint Semantic Specificity in Contrastive Embedding Norms

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5arXiv · cs.LG·15h ago·source ↗

Theoretical framework explains why contrastive embedding norms encode semantic specificity

A new arXiv preprint provides a formal theoretical explanation for why embedding magnitudes in contrastive models trained with scale-invariant losses correlate with semantic properties like concept specificity, token frequency, and human uncertainty — despite norms being ignored by cosine similarity metrics. The authors derive an analytic formula showing that embedding length encodes this information as a byproduct of optimization dynamics. The work suggests these norms can serve as 'free' calibration signals in retrieval tasks, grounding a previously heuristic observation.