# Beyond Black Boxes: Visual Grounding for Text Embeddings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18047 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18047/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Sub-Sentence Encoder: Contrastive Learning of Propositional Semantic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04335/) (2023)
- [Can Mental Imagery Improve the Thinking Capabilities of AI Systems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12555/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, our goal is to represent text embeddings as sketches for three main reasons. First, to visualize text representation and to explore their potential their potential for AI explainability. Second, to investigate the potential benefits of the sketch-based representation for information retrieval. Third, to explore their potential for reasoning, drawing inspiration from the concept of mental imagery. We propose a sketch-based visual grounding framework that transforms text representations into visual topographic sketches. Our approach aims to emphasis the semantics content encoded in the text embeddings through the corresponding sketch. Evaluations are conducted on the MS-COCO dataset to examine the utility of these sketches for text retrieval. The comparative study of SBERT and Sketch-based method reveals that SBERT retains an advantage in strict top-1 retrieval accuracy while achieving comparable performance to the sketch-based method in top-5 retrieval. A cascaded approach combining SBERT and the sketch-based method outperforms SBERT alone, suggesting that the Sketch-based representation could offer significant potential for information retrieval if trained directly on text.