HiHPQ: Hierarchical Hyperbolic Product Quantization for Unsupervised Image Retrieval

Zexuan Qiu, Jiahong Liu, Yankai Chen, Irwin King

Abstract: Existing unsupervised deep product quantization methods primarily aim for the increased similarity between different views of the identical image, whereas the delicate multi-level semantic similarities preserved between images are overlooked. Moreover, these methods predominantly focus on the Euclidean space for computational convenience, compromising their ability to map the multi-level semantic relationships between images effectively. To mitigate these shortcomings, we propose a novel unsupervised product quantization method dubbed Hierarchical Hyperbolic Product Quantization (HiHPQ), which learns quantized representations by incorporating hierarchical semantic similarity within hyperbolic geometry. Specifically, we propose a hyperbolic product quantizer, where the hyperbolic codebook attention mechanism and the quantized contrastive learning on the hyperbolic product manifold are introduced to expedite quantization. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical semantics learning module, designed to enhance the distinction between similar and non-matching images for a query by utilizing the extracted hierarchical semantics as an additional training supervision. Experiments on benchmark image datasets show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.