# Hard Negative Mining

> Source: https://sukruyusufkaya.com/en/glossary/hard-negative-mining
> Updated: 2026-05-13T20:02:23.962Z
> Type: glossary
> Category: dogal-dil-isleme
**TLDR:** A training strategy that improves retrieval and matching quality by providing semantically confusing hard negatives rather than easy negatives.

<p>Hard negative mining is one of the key determinants of representation quality in contrastive learning and retrieval training. Easy negatives often provide little learning value; the real gains come from examples that are semantically close yet incorrect. This makes training-data design nearly as important as the architecture itself. It can produce major quality improvements, especially in dense retrieval systems.</p>