Orthogonality

Why orthogonality, not opposition, is maximal difference for unit vectors, and what that means for CLIP, InfoNCE, and SimCLR.

1 post tagged #orthogonality.

Feb 22, 2026

Opposite Is Not Different: The Cosine-Similarity Bug in CLIP and Contrastive Learning

Maximum difference between two unit vectors is orthogonality (cos = 0), not opposition (cos = −1). CLIP, InfoNCE, and SimCLR have been optimizing for the wrong target for years.