arxivcs.CVcs.LG2026-07-06
Is the Geometry Doing the Work? An Operating-Point Audit of Hierarchy in Hyperbolic Vision-Language Models
Jaeyoung Kim, Eunseok Kim, Dongsuk Jang
Hyperbolic vision-language models are designed to encode abstraction geometrically: general concepts near the origin, specific ones farther out, and entailment cones representing directed order. We ask whether trained MERU, HyCoCLIP, and PHyCLIP models actually use these mechanis…