[
    {
        "id": "osp-15100",
        "type": "article-journal",
        "title": "ProtoSemImage: Image-Valued Prototypes with Deformable Row Alignment for Interpretable Document Classification",
        "author": [
            {
                "family": "Zare",
                "given": "Mohammad"
            },
            {
                "family": "Shamsinejadbabaki",
                "given": "Pirooz"
            }
        ],
        "URL": "https://omanscience.com/en/articles/protosemimage-image-valued-prototypes-with-deformable-row-alignment-for-interpretable-document-classification",
        "language": "en",
        "issued": {
            "date-parts": [
                [
                    2026
                ]
            ]
        },
        "abstract": "Prototypes in classification models are almost always vectors, and a vector has no readable form. This paper asks what happens when a prototype is an image. Documents give the question a natural form, because a document can be rendered as a multi-channel image in which every token becomes a pixel, so a class representative can take the same shape and the same channel semantics as the inputs it stands for. ProtoSemImage represents each class by one or more visual archetypes: prototype images in a four-channel HSV space whose channels carry named linguistic factors. A Skip-Gram objective learns that color space end to end through a four-dimensional bottleneck, discourse boundary rows become differentiable typed difference rows, and classification reduces to 2D visual template matching: a deformable row alignment between a document image and the archetype bank, in the spirit of dynamic time warping. Because the match is a spatial pattern comparison rather than a linear readout, the model reports where an input departs from its archetype and along which channel, and a generative head decodes each archetype back into text. The image representation works: it beats an otherwise identical model with vector prototypes in all three paired seeds, by between 4.3 and 11.8 points on a ten-class task. The distance-based matching does not. A diagnostic that keeps the representation fixed and swaps only the classifier recovers the sequence baselines, which locates a 20.6-point shortfall in the matching rather than in the color compression, and a benchmark built so that a pair of documents shares a bag of words and differs only in arrangement confirms the layout-preservation it was designed for. We report both directions, because for a representation whose whole purpose is inspect ability, the failure modes are as informative as the gains."
    }
]