arXiv Computer Vision

What Drives Hierarchy-Aware Image Retrieval? Taxonomy Alignment, Objective Choice, and Geometry

The paper investigates why hierarchical image retrieval improves when using frozen DINOv2 features. It compares Euclidean and hyperbolic embeddings trained with taxonomy-distance regression or a taxonomy-aware supervised contrastive objective, finding that the choice of loss function (objective family) contributes more to hierarchy-aware performance than the geometry of the embedding space. Semantic alignment of the taxonomy also plays a significant role, while stronger negative curvature does not explain the gains.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Calibrating Retrieval Geometry: Reliability-Guided Training-Free Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition

The paper introduces TFA, a training‑free aggregation technique that calibrates frozen visual foundation models for visual place recognition. TFA uses cross‑codebook agreement, retrieval coverage, and spectral statistics to adjust residual assignment, spectral shaping, and global‑feature fusion without requiring place labels or task‑specific weights. Experiments with a DINOv2‑B backbone show significant Recall@1 gains over existing training‑free methods across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that reliability‑guided aggregation can unlock additional retrieval performance from frozen representations.

By Xin Li, Zhimin Mao, Shang Wang, Siyuan Duan, Geng Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 12

Can Edge-Deployable Vision-Language Models Identify Species?

arXiv:2609. 11916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camera traps often run in the field on edge hardware with limited or no connectivity, making small, locally-deployable vision-language models (VLMs) -- not frontier-scale ones -- the practically relevant class to evaluate for species identification.

By William Zhou, Mayukha Siripuram, Xiao Yan, Ziqi Liu, Yi Ding
arXiv AI
Sep 1

When Images Look Right and Retrieve Wrong: Coverage-Guided Cross-Scale Re-Indexing for Knowledge-Faithful Generative Perception

The paper introduces CERES, a closed‑loop multimodal indexing framework that addresses semantic collapse in multimodal generation by building a three‑level semantic pyramid and using scale‑routed cross‑attention to generate images that remain retrievable by their original queries. CERES employs a co‑occurrence‑aware router, a lightweight U‑Net generator, and a soft‑Jaccard coverage objective to ensure generated images cover the intended concepts, verified by re‑indexing with a frozen vision‑language model and an external DINOv2 probe. Experiments on four pansharpening benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, especially under extreme scale variation, and significant improvements in concept‑query retrieval and image‑text ranking metrics.

By Guangyuan Dong, Chuang Liu, Haoyu Wang, Yangchen Zeng, Jiaqi Zhang, Li Jiuxing, Xiaoyang Yu, Pinlong Zhao, Yuchao Hou, Ziwei Li, Zheng Lin, Alexander Lim Han Yang, Yusen Wu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Explaining, Verifying, and Aligning Semantic Hierarchies in Vision-Language Model Embeddings

arXiv:2603. 26798v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language model (VLM) encoders such as CLIP enable strong retrieval and zero-shot classification in a shared image-text embedding space, yet the semantic organization of this space is rarely inspected.

By Gesina Schwalbe, Mert Keser, Moritz Bayerkuhnlein, Edgar Heinert, Annika M\"utze, Marvin Keller, Sparsh Tiwari, Georgii Mikriukov, Diedrich Wolter, Jae Hee Lee, Matthias Rottmann
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

Retrieval Geometry Shapes Cache-Based Clip Adaptation

The paper investigates how the choice of retrieval encoder affects cache‑based test‑time adaptation for CLIP. By keeping the memory fixed and varying the retrieval space across sixteen encoders, the authors show that retrieval space can dramatically alter performance, with gains ranging from +0.44 to +19.7 points on ImageNet‑A. They introduce MARC, a training‑free system that pairs frozen CLIP with DINOv2‑B for retrieval, achieving superior out‑of‑distribution accuracy and efficiency compared to prior methods.

By Mahir Shahriar Tamim, Md. Samiul Alim, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Shahriyar Zaman Ridoy, Meharun Nesa, Mohammad Abu Yousuf, Alex Lamb, Mohammad Ali Moni