Explain multimodal fusion: early, late, and cross-attention. Which architecture would you pick, and when?
Four fusion families, and the choice between them is decided by one question most candidates never ask. Naming CLIP and LLaVA is table stakes; the score comes from knowing which one cannot reason and which one eats your context window.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Four fusion families, and the choice between them is decided by one question most candidates never ask. Naming CLIP and LLaVA is table stakes; the score comes from knowing which one cannot reason and which one eats your context window.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
