arXiv AI

Image Clustering with Vision-Language Model Embeddings

arXiv AI
Oct 16

CIM-Embed: Learning Instruction-Conditioned Multimodal Embeddings for Clustering

CIM-Embed is a framework that learns instruction‑conditioned multimodal embeddings for clustering. It uses supervised contrastive learning with same‑group positives and negatives from other groups, and handles tasks with varying group counts via heterogeneous structured batches. At inference, the model maps an object’s image, text, and instruction to an embedding, and HDBSCAN clusters these embeddings without requiring a pre‑specified cluster count. The authors introduce ProductMIC, a benchmark of 5,373 Amazon products and 449 grouping tasks, and report a mean per‑task V‑measure of 95.01, outperforming the best general‑purpose baseline.

By Yinghua Xu, Pengyang Xie, Yanxiang Zhou, Chuanzhi Tong, Xiao Xiao, Chaoqun Feng, Xiaoqing Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

UVU: Improving Multimodal Understanding via Vision-Language Unified Autoregressive Paradigm

UVU is a vision-language unified autoregressive framework that integrates visual supervision directly into the pre-training stage of multimodal large language models. By using continuous visual encoding and a large-scale iterative hierarchical clustering algorithm to build a pixel-level visual codebook, UVU enables lossless representation of visual inputs and autoregressive generation of pixel-level image tokens alongside textual tokens. This approach synergizes pixel-level visual perception with semantic-level visual understanding, allowing models to internalize visual reconstruction capabilities and improve multimodal understanding performance.

By Zhehan Kan, Xinghua Jiang, Yubo Zhu, Yanlin Liu, Xiaochen Yang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun
arXiv AI
Jun 24

Evaluating the Interpretability of Sparse Autoencoders with Concept Annotations

arXiv:2606. 24716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence.

By Jonas Klotz, Cassio F. Dantas, Pallavi Jain, Diego Marcos, Beg\"um Demir
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

DataComp-VLM: Improved Open Datasets for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 28551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Building performant Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires carefully curating large-scale training datasets, yet the community lacks systematic benchmarks for evaluating such curation strategies.

By Matteo Farina, Vishaal Udandarao, Thao Nguyen, Selim Kuzucu, Maximilian B\"other, Andreas Hochlehnert, Adhiraj Ghosh, Marianna Nezhurina, Karsten Roth, Joschka Struber, Yuhui Zhang, Sebastian Dziadzio, Elaine Sui, Soumya Jahagirdar, Dhruba Ghosh, Hasan Hammoud, Thomas De Min, Simone Caldarella, Jehanzeb Mirza, Sedrick Keh, Mehdi Cherti, Hilde Kuehne, Bernt Schiele, Serena Yeung-Levy, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Federico Tombari, Ana Klimovic, Elisa Ricci, Matthias Bethge, Sewoong Oh, Ameya Prabhu, Alessio Tonioni, Jenia Jitsev, Massimiliano Mancini, Ludwig Schmidt, Nikhil Parthasarathy
arXiv AI
Sep 7

An Empirical Study into Clustering of Unseen Datasets with Self-Supervised Encoders

The paper investigates whether pretrained image models can generalize to unseen datasets by clustering their embeddings. Using encoders trained only on ImageNet‑1k, both supervised and self‑supervised, the authors evaluate clustering performance on out‑of‑domain images. They find that supervised encoders perform better within the training domain, while self‑supervised encoders excel far outside it, and that fine‑tuning self‑supervised models reverses this trend. Additionally, the study shows that the silhouette score in UMAP‑reduced space correlates strongly with clustering accuracy, offering a proxy metric when labels are unavailable.

By Scott C. Lowe, Joakim Bruslund Haurum, Sageev Oore, Thomas B. Moeslund, Graham W. Taylor