Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Zhi, Phan, Hau, Emigh, Matthew, Brockmeier, Austin J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20322
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909757152952320
author Li, Zhi
Phan, Hau
Emigh, Matthew
Brockmeier, Austin J.
author_facet Li, Zhi
Phan, Hau
Emigh, Matthew
Brockmeier, Austin J.
contents Vision-language co-embedding networks, such as CLIP, provide a latent embedding space with semantic information that is useful for downstream tasks. We hypothesize that the embedding space can be disentangled to separate the information on the content of complex scenes by decomposing the embedding into multiple concept-specific component vectors that lie in different subspaces. We propose a supervised dictionary learning approach to estimate a linear synthesis model consisting of sparse, non-negative combinations of groups of vectors in the dictionary (atoms), whose group-wise activity matches the multi-label information. Each concept-specific component is a non-negative combination of atoms associated to a label. The group-structured dictionary is optimized through a novel alternating optimization with guaranteed convergence. Exploiting the text co-embeddings, we detail how semantically meaningful descriptions can be found based on text embeddings of words best approximated by a concept's group of atoms, and unsupervised dictionary learning can exploit zero-shot classification of training set images using the text embeddings of concept labels to provide instance-wise multi-labels. We show that the disentangled embeddings provided by our sparse linear concept subspaces (SLiCS) enable concept-filtered image retrieval (and conditional generation using image-to-prompt) that is more precise. We also apply SLiCS to highly-compressed autoencoder embeddings from TiTok and the latent embedding from self-supervised DINOv2. Quantitative and qualitative results highlight the improved precision of the concept-filtered image retrieval for all embeddings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_20322
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Disentangling Latent Embeddings with Sparse Linear Concept Subspaces (SLiCS)
Li, Zhi
Phan, Hau
Emigh, Matthew
Brockmeier, Austin J.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-language co-embedding networks, such as CLIP, provide a latent embedding space with semantic information that is useful for downstream tasks. We hypothesize that the embedding space can be disentangled to separate the information on the content of complex scenes by decomposing the embedding into multiple concept-specific component vectors that lie in different subspaces. We propose a supervised dictionary learning approach to estimate a linear synthesis model consisting of sparse, non-negative combinations of groups of vectors in the dictionary (atoms), whose group-wise activity matches the multi-label information. Each concept-specific component is a non-negative combination of atoms associated to a label. The group-structured dictionary is optimized through a novel alternating optimization with guaranteed convergence. Exploiting the text co-embeddings, we detail how semantically meaningful descriptions can be found based on text embeddings of words best approximated by a concept's group of atoms, and unsupervised dictionary learning can exploit zero-shot classification of training set images using the text embeddings of concept labels to provide instance-wise multi-labels. We show that the disentangled embeddings provided by our sparse linear concept subspaces (SLiCS) enable concept-filtered image retrieval (and conditional generation using image-to-prompt) that is more precise. We also apply SLiCS to highly-compressed autoencoder embeddings from TiTok and the latent embedding from self-supervised DINOv2. Quantitative and qualitative results highlight the improved precision of the concept-filtered image retrieval for all embeddings.
title Disentangling Latent Embeddings with Sparse Linear Concept Subspaces (SLiCS)
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20322