Image Clustering with Vision-Language Model Embeddings

arXiv:2610.33265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained vision-language models provide image representations whose suitability for clustering may vary with feature extraction, image domain, and partitioning algorithm. We compare nine representation pipelines across seven image benchmarks and four clustering configurations, yielding 252 baseline combinations. Eight pipelines extract visual features, including two vision-only references; the ninth generates descriptions and embeds the resulting text. With agglomerative clustering (Ward linkage) fixed, Qwen3-VL achieves the highest adjusted Rand index (ARI) on five datasets, including 0.925 on MNIST, while BLIP-2 leads on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 with ARIs of 0.925 and 0.591, respectively. A separate sensitivity analysis compares raw and L2-normalized embeddings at their original dimensionality across all 63 dataset-representation pairs. Normalization preserves the highest-ARI representation in every dataset, increases ARI in 35 pairs, decreases it in 26, and leaves two numerically unchanged. On the SVHN dataset, the highest ARI remains low, rising from 0.097 to 0.098 after normalization. The evaluated caption-mediated pipeline obtains relatively high ARI on isolated digits but does not consistently exceed direct visual features. These findings support selecting and evaluating complete representation-clustering pipelines for the intended domain, with explicit attention to extraction and normalization choices.