hierarchical

Definition

Organizing computation or representation into levels of increasing abstraction — fine-grained local units at the bottom, coarser summaries above. It is a standard way to make long sequences or high-resolution inputs tractable, since the upper levels operate on far fewer elements. Note the contrast with recursive: recursion reapplies the same operation to its own output, whereas a hierarchy stacks stages that work at different granularities.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Explained: FreeFlow — Optical Flow with a Hierarchical Transformer and No Flow-Specific PartsFreeFlow: A Bias-free Hierarchical Transformer for Optical Flow Estimation
• Hi-Q explained (arXiv:2608.30468) — multi-hop query refinementHi-Q: Hierarchical Evidence-guided Query Refinement for Multi-Hop Question Answering
• Build Your Own Vector DB — From Brute Force to HNSWEfficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs