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

ArXi:2603.26798v1 Announce Type: cross 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. We present a post-hoc framework to explain, verify, and align the semantic hierarchies induced by a VLM over a given set of child classes. First, we extract a binary hierarchy by agglomerative clustering of class centroids and name internal nodes by dictionary-based matching to a concept bank.