Hierarchical Representation Learning

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Overview

Hierarchical representation learning studies how models can encode data at multiple levels, from local details such as pixels, atoms, or signal segments to broader objects, concepts, and tasks. Common approaches use multiscale pooling and attention, self-supervised prediction or contrastive learning across levels, and explicit taxonomies or graphs; hyperbolic geometry is often used to represent tree-like relationships. These methods are applied to images, language, graphs, molecules, medical data, and long time series, often to improve transfer, fine-grained prediction, retrieval, or interpretability. A central tension is whether useful hierarchies should be imposed from labels and domain knowledge or discovered from data, and how to preserve fine detail without making representations costly or overly constrained.

Latest papers

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229 papers12 papers in the last four weeks, down 52% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. TaxoMFM: A Taxonomy-Aware Foundation Model for the Human Gut Microbiome

    Oct 29, 2026Haochen Xue, Anastasia Godneva, Yulong Li +6BioinformaticsHierarchical Representation Learning

    Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · Weizmann Institute of Science

  2. Accelerating Nonlinear MPC by Behavior Cloning with Separated Timescales: Application to Nuclear Reactor Load-Following

    Oct 28, 2026Perceval Beja-Battais, Alain Grosset{ê}te, Nicolas VayatisBehavior CloningNonlinear MPC

    CB

  3. SSQA: Sibling-Selective Quadtree Attention for Hierarchical Modeling in Perception Tasks

    Oct 28, 2026Yufan Chen, Arnav Bali, Angela Liu +2Efficient ViTsHierarchical Representation Learning

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA. · South River High School, Edgewater, MD, USA. · Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.

  4. Euclidean Crowding-Driven Adaptive Euclidean-Hyperbolic Graph Learning

    Oct 27, 2026Hao Chen, Jian Sun, Chuan Shi +1Graph Representation LearningHyperbolic Representation Learning

    School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China · Beijing Key Lab of Intelligent Telecommunications Software and Multimedia, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China

  5. Hierarchical Multimodal Interaction Reasoning for Dyadic Relationship Recognition

    Oct 26, 2026Wang Tang, Fethiye Irmak Dogan, Linbo Qing +2Relational ReasoningMultimodal Reasoning

    School of Software Engineering, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu 610103, China · AFAR Lab, Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, CB3 0FT Cambridge, U.K. · College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China +1

  6. TaxoSAE: Rethinking Sparse Autoencoders through Taxonomic Logic

    Oct 22, 2026Xinyu Guo, Minglai Yang, Clayton T. Morrison +2Sparse AutoencodersHierarchical Representation Learning

    University of Arizona · Scale AI

  7. NEST: Nested Embedding Representation for Multiscale Clustering

    Oct 21, 2026Zhanqi Zhang, Mikio Aoi, Gal MishneClusteringUnsupervised Clustering

    Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego · Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, UC San Diego · Neurobiology, UC San Diego +1

  8. Hierarchical Token Merging with Recursive Autoencoders for Unsupervised Grammar Induction

    Oct 19, 2026Murat Guney Kemal, Robert LieckHierarchical Representation LearningCompositional Representation Learning

    Department of Computer Science Durham University

  9. Uncovering Semantic Hierarchies in Text-Attributed Graphs via Variational EM-based LLM-GNN Synergy

    Oct 17, 2026Yunhui Liu, Xudong Jin, Qizhuo Xie +5Text-Attributed Graph LearningHierarchical Representation Learning

    State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University · Department of Statistics, University of Wisconsin–Madison · National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data Analysis and Applications, Peking University

  10. Hierarchical Interpretable Multitask Audio Representation Learning: An Analysis of Event-Scene Relationships through the Information Bottleneck

    Oct 15, 2026Claudia Montero-Ramírez, Alba Martínez-Serrano, Carmen Peláez-MorenoAudio ClassificationMulti-Task Learning

  11. SMI: Ontology-Grounded Semantic IDs for Hierarchy-Aware Medical Concept Representation

    Oct 13, 2026Ziyang Song, Lia Shen, Yixuan Li +6Representation LearningHierarchical Representation Learning

    School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Ohio University · Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology, University of Southern California · School of Computer Science, McGill University +2

  12. GeoMER: A Joint Euclidean-Hyperbolic Geometry Framework for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

    Oct 13, 2026Ting Zhu, Huizhi Liang, Boguslaw Obara +2Multimodal Emotion RecognitionMultimodal Fusion

    Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom · Taiyuan University of Technology, Shanxi, China

  13. HASTE: Hierarchical and Attribute-aware Supervision for Generative Recommendation

    Oct 12, 2026Tripti Shukla, Shwetha Somasundaram, Akshat Gupta +3Long-Tail RecommendationRecommender Systems

    Glance Bengaluru, India · Glance Vilnius, Lithuania · Glance London, United Kingdom

  14. Hyperbolic Graph Representation Learning: Embed in One Metric, Optimize with Another

    Oct 5, 2026Federico Larroca, Paola Bermolen, Marcelo Fiori +1Riemannian OptimizationHierarchical Representation Learning

    Facultad de Ingenier´ıa Universidad de la Rep´ublica Uruguay

  15. HiER-BLS: A Hierarchy-Guided and Error-Correcting Robust Incremental Broad Learning System

    Oct 5, 2026Gongli Zhang, C. L. Philip Chen, Zhulin LiuHierarchical Representation LearningNeural Network Robustness

    Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computational AI Models and Cognitive Intelligence, the School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China, also with the Pazhou Lab, Guangzhou 510335, China, and also with the Engineering Research Center of the Ministry of Education on Health Intelligent Perception and Paralleled Digital-Human, Guangzhou 510641, China

  16. HIGS: Hierarchical Implicit Grids for Joint Geometric and Semantic Scene Understanding

    Sep 29, 2026Hanwen Cao, Wenqiang Wu, Kuang-Ting Tu +5Implicit Neural RepresentationsHierarchical Representation Learning

    University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA · Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, China · Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway +2

  17. Minkowski Attractor Networks: Closed-Form Hyperbolic Flows for Visual Representations

    Sep 29, 2026Zhongping JiVisual Representation LearningHierarchical Representation Learning

  18. Progressive Memory Transformer: Memory-Aware Attention for Time-Series

    Sep 25, 2026Tord Sture Stangeland, Andreas Köhler, Steffen Mæland +1Self-Supervised Time Series Representation LearningTemporal Representation Learning

    University of Oslo, Department of Informatics, Oslo, Norway · NORSAR, Lillestrøm, Norway · University of Tromsø, Department of Geosciences, Tromsø, Norway +1

  19. Learning Hierarchical Causal Representations of the Effects of Forcings on Temperature in Climate Models

    Sep 25, 2026Shan Zhao, Ilija Trajkovic, Julia Kaltenborn +4Surrogate ModelingCausal Representation Learning

    Technical University of Munich Munich, Germany · Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Karlsruhe, Germany · McGill University & Mila Montreal, Canada +1

  20. HCOE: Hyperbolic Clinical Ontology Embeddings from Biomedical Language Models

    Sep 25, 2026Yixuan Li, Weihao Li, Ziyang SongMedication RecommendationHierarchical Representation Learning

    McGill University · Northwestern University · Ohio University

  21. HCPN-GCN: Scaling Hierarchical Prototype Networks with Cone Geometry for Continual Graph Learning

    Sep 25, 2026Sammuel R. Silva, Vander L. S. Freitas, Gladston Moreira +2Incremental LearningHierarchical Representation Learning

    Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Ouro Preto 35402-163, Brasil

  22. A Hierarchy-Aware Video-Language Model Evaluation and Hyperbolic Baseline for Surgery

    Sep 22, 2026Ana Manzano Rodríguez, Pascal Mettes, Marlies P. Schijven +1Video-Language Model EvaluationHierarchical Representation Learning

    Data Science Center HAVA-Lab, University of Amsterdam · Video & Image Sense Lab, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam · Amsterdam UMC Location University of Amsterdam, Surgery +2

  23. Geometry-Aware Hyperbolic Residual-Quantized Variational Autoencoders

    Sep 22, 2026Alessio Colombo, Melika AyoughiResidual VQHierarchical Representation Learning

    Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

  24. Modern GLOM: Canonical locks that encode part-whole hierarchies

    Sep 22, 2026Rajat Modi, Yogesh Singh RawatVisual Representation LearningHierarchical Representation Learning

    Department of Computer Science, University of Central Florida, United States.

  25. What Drives Hierarchy-Aware Image Retrieval? Taxonomy Alignment, Objective Choice, and Geometry

    Sep 22, 2026Ling ShiImage RetrievalHierarchical Representation Learning

    Southeast University

  26. MIND the Gap: A Geographic Implicit Neural Representation with Adjustable Spatial Scale

    Sep 21, 2026Isaac Corley, Arjun Rao, Esther Rolf +7Geospatial Reasoning BenchmarksGeospatial Representation Learning

    Taylor Geospatial · University of British Columbia · Vector Institute +7

  27. Hierarchical Prompt Learning for Hyperbolic Vision-Language Models

    Sep 21, 2026Andro Erdelez, Pascal Mettes, Behzad BozorgtabarVLM AdaptationVision-Language Models

    Aarhus University · University of Amsterdam

  28. The Visual Target Matters: Learning across the Visual Hierarchy for Brain-to-Image Retrieval

    Sep 21, 2026Ye Wang, Haokun Ren, Hong Yu +4Visual Representation LearningEEG-Based Visual Decoding

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing, China · College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, China · Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China +1

  29. HDND: Hierarchical Dynamic Neural Decoding for Multilingual Word/Character Retrieval from Non-Invasive Brain Recordings

    Sep 21, 2026Yueyang Li, Shuran Chen, Wai Ting Siok +1Dynamic Neural NetworksNeural Decoding

    Department of Language Science and Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China

  30. InterHier: Learning Interconnected Hierarchical Semantics for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

    Sep 21, 2026Yeong-Jin Kim, Ho-Joong Kim, Seong-Whan LeeOpen-Vocabulary Object DetectionPrompt Learning

    Department of Artificial Intelligence, Korea University, Seoul 02841, Republic of Korea