# Hyper3-CLIP: Hierarchy-Conditioned Hyperbolic Vision-Language Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29313 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29313/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 22 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/prompt-learning-and-adaptation-of-clip/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [Poincar'e Embeddings for Learning Hierarchical Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08039/) (2017)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [Hyperbolic Entailment Cones for Learning Hierarchical Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01882/) (2018)
- [Hyperbolic Image-Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09172/) (2023)
- [Compositional Entailment Learning for Hyperbolic Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06912/) (2024)
- [Emergent Visual-Semantic Hierarchies in Image-Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08521/) (2024)
- [Position: Beyond Euclidean -- Foundation Models Should Embrace Non-Euclidean Geometries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08896/) (2025)
- [PHyCLIP: ℓ1-Product of Hyperbolic Factors Unifies Hierarchy and Compositionality in Vision-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08919/) (2025)
- [β-CLIP: Text-Conditioned Contrastive Learning for Multi-Granular Vision-Language Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12678/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-guided Compositional Alignment with Part-to-Whole Semantic Representativeness in Hyperbolic Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22042/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

CLIP-like vision-language models (VLMs) trained with contrastive objectives learn strong global image-text representations, but their Euclidean embeddings and global pooling fail to encode relational structure such as part-whole and parent-child relations. Hyperbolic VLMs address this gap with entailment-based objectives, and text-conditioned variants improve fine-grained alignment through sentence- and phrase-level queries. However, these two lines of work remain separate: hyperbolic VLMs use static image and region features, while query-conditioned methods lack hierarchical geometric structure. We present Hyper3-CLIP, a hierarchy-conditioned hyperbolic VLM that combines global, local, and global-local contrastive learning with query-conditioned visual pooling. To train the model, we construct lightweight query hierarchies from text, comprising full captions, sentence fragments, localized part descriptions, and extracted phrases. Each query conditions the pooling of visual patches, and the resulting representations support image-text, whole-part, and parent-child entailment losses. Query-conditioned pooling is active only during training. Hyper3-CLIP improves R@5 and R@10 retrieval on COCO and Flickr, as well as multi-label classification on VOC and COCO, while remaining competitive on hierarchy metrics. We also audit zero-shot prompt sensitivity under fixed prompt regimes and study the effect of the localized GRIT part budget used during training. Code is available at https://github.com/Hyper3Labs/hyper3-clip.