How do vision-language models (VLMs) work, and how does CLIP enable cross-modal understanding?
Multimodal is now table stakes, and this tests whether you understand how images and text reach a shared model. The signal is CLIP's contrastive alignment and how modern VLMs feed image features into an LLM's token space.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Multimodal is now table stakes, and this tests whether you understand how images and text reach a shared model. The signal is CLIP's contrastive alignment and how modern VLMs feed image features into an LLM's token space.
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.
