Learning Visual Hierarchies in Hyperbolic Space for Image Retrieval

Ziwei Wang, Sameera Ramasinghe, Chenchen Xu, Julien Monteil, Loris Bazzani, Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025, pp. 9924-9934

Structuring latent representations in a hierarchical manner enables models to learn patterns at multiple levels of abstraction. However, most prevalent image understanding models focus on visual similarity, and learning visual hierarchies is relatively unexplored. In this work, for the first time, we introduce a learning paradigm that can encode user-defined multi-level complex visual hierarchies in hyperbolic space without requiring explicit hierarchical labels. As a concrete example, first, we define a part-based image hierarchy using object-level annotations within and across images. Then, we introduce an approach to enforce the hierarchy using contrastive loss with pairwise entailment metrics. Finally, we discuss new evaluation metrics to effectively measure hierarchical image retrieval. Encoding these complex relationships ensures that the learned representations capture semantic and structural information that transcends mere visual similarity. Experiments in part-based image retrieval show significant improvements in hierarchical retrieval tasks, demonstrating the capability of our model in capturing visual hierarchies.