Contrastive used in a sentence

Contrastive in a sentence as an adjective

Backprop has always been known to have problems when you scale to millions of connections, and his work on RBMs/DBNs is really quite old. What was novel more recently was showing that the contrastive divergence step need only be performed once, rather than 100 times, while the performance remained similar.

An English speaker can certainly hear the tones, and may even be able to pick out different tones in isolation, but it takes significant training to be able to interpret them as contrastive as opposed to inflectional, etc.