Most existing Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) methods have the strong bias problem, in which instances of unseen (target) classes tend to be categorized as one of the seen (source) classes. So they yield poor performance after being deployed in the generalized ZSL settings. In this paper, we propose a straightforward yet effective method named Quasi-Fully Supervised Learning (QFSL) to alleviate the bias problem. Our method follows the way of transductive learning, which assumes that both the labeled source images and unlabeled target images are available for training. In the semantic embedding space, the labeled source images are mapped to several fixed points specified by the source categories, and the unlabeled target images are forced to be mapped to other points specified by the target categories. Experiments conducted on AwA2, CUB and SUN datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by a huge margin of 9.3 24.5 following generalized ZSL settings, and by a large margin of 0.2 16.2 following conventional ZSL settings.
ZSL relies on the semantic space to associate source and target classes. Various semantic spaces have been investigated, including attributes @cite_33 @cite_3 @cite_44 @cite_40 @cite_29 , word vector @cite_4 @cite_0 , text description @cite_23 @cite_13 and human gaze @cite_5 . The attribute has been shown to be an effective semantic space @cite_14 @cite_20 @cite_29 for ZSL. However, its superior performance is obtained at the cost of much more expensive human labor. As an alternative, the word vectors are gaining more attention recently @cite_15 @cite_39 since they are learned from the large text corpus in an unsupervised way. Albeit their popularity, the word vectors often suffer from visual-semantic discrepancy problem @cite_2 @cite_21 @cite_25 . In addition to the word vectors, human gaze @cite_5 is recently proposed to replace the attributes, as its annotation can be performed by non-experts without domain knowledge.
@cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_33 @cite_29 @cite_21 @cite_3 @cite_39 @cite_44 @cite_0 @cite_40 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_13 @cite_25 @cite_20
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Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to transfer knowledge from observed classes to the unseen classes, based on the assumption that both the seen and unseen classes share a common semantic space, among which attributes enjoy a great popularity. However, few works study whether the human-designed semantic attributes are discriminative enough to recognize different classes. Moreover, attributes are often correlated with each other, which makes it less desirable to learn each attribute independently. In this paper, we propose to learn a latent attribute space, which is not only discriminative but also semantic-preserving, to perform the ZSL task. Specifically, a dictionary learning framework is exploited to connect the latent attribute space with attribute space and similarity space. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Zero shot learning (ZSL) provides a solution to recognising unseen classes without class labelled data for model learning. Most ZSL methods aim to learn a mapping from a visual feature space to a semantic embedding space, e.g. attribute or word vector spaces. The use of word vector space is particularly attractive as compared to attribute, it offers vast auxiliary classes with free parts embedding without human annotation. However, using the word vector embedding often provides weaker discriminative power than manually labelled attributes of the auxiliary classes. This is compounded further in zero-shot action recognition due to richer content variations among action classes. In this work we propose to explore a broader semantic contextual information in the text domain to enrich the word vector representation of action classes. We show through extensive experiments that this method improves significantly the performance of a number of existing word vector embedding ZSL methods. Moreover, it also outperforms attribute embedding ZSL with human annotation. Object recognition by zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognise objects without seeing any visual examples by learning knowledge transfer between seen and unseen object classes. This is typically achieved by exploring a semantic embedding space such as attribute space or semantic word vector space. In such a space, both seen and unseen class labels, as well as image features can be embedded (projected), and the similarity between them can thus be measured directly. Existing works differ in what embedding space is used and how to project the visual data into the semantic embedding space. Yet, they all measure the similarity in the space using a conventional distance metric (e.g. cosine) that does not consider the rich intrinsic structure, i.e. semantic manifold, of the semantic categories in the embedding space. In this paper we propose to model the semantic manifold in an embedding space using a semantic class label graph. The semantic manifold structure is used to redefine the distance metric in the semantic embedding space for more effective ZSL. The proposed semantic manifold distance is computed using a novel absorbing Markov chain process (AMP), which has a very efficient closed-form solution. The proposed new model improves upon and seamlessly unifies various existing ZSL algorithms. Extensive experiments on both the large scale ImageNet dataset and the widely used Animal with Attribute (AwA) dataset show that our model outperforms significantly the state-of-the-arts. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) models rely on learning a joint embedding space where both textual semantic description of object classes and visual representation of object images can be projected to for nearest neighbour search. Despite the success of deep neural networks that learn an end-to-end model between text and images in other vision problems such as image captioning, very few deep ZSL model exists and they show little advantage over ZSL models that utilise deep feature representations but do not learn an end-to-end embedding. In this paper we argue that the key to make deep ZSL models succeed is to choose the right embedding space. Instead of embedding into a semantic space or an intermediate space, we propose to use the visual space as the embedding space. This is because that in this space, the subsequent nearest neighbour search would suffer much less from the hubness problem and thus become more effective. This model design also provides a natural mechanism for multiple semantic modalities (e.g., attributes and sentence descriptions) to be fused and optimised jointly in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that our model significantly outperforms the existing models. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) models rely on learning a joint embedding space where both textual semantic description of object classes and visual representation of object images can be projected to for nearest neighbour search. Despite the success of deep neural networks that learn an end-to-end model between text and images in other vision problems such as image captioning, very few deep ZSL model exists and they show little advantage over ZSL models that utilise deep feature representations but do not learn an end-to-end embedding. In this paper we argue that the key to make deep ZSL models succeed is to choose the right embedding space. Instead of embedding into a semantic space or an intermediate space, we propose to use the visual space as the embedding space. This is because that in this space, the subsequent nearest neighbour search would suffer much less from the hubness problem and thus become more effective. This model design also provides a natural mechanism for multiple semantic modalities (e.g., attributes and sentence descriptions) to be fused and optimised jointly in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that our model significantly outperforms the existing models. Sufficient training examples are the fundamental requirement for most of the learning tasks. However, collecting well-labelled training examples is costly. Inspired by Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) that can make use of visual attributes or natural language semantics as an intermediate level clue to associate low-level features with high-level classes, in a novel extension of this idea, we aim to synthesise training data for novel classes using only semantic attributes. Despite the simplicity of this idea, there are several challenges. First, how to prevent the synthesised data from over-fitting to training classes? Second, how to guarantee the synthesised data is discriminative for ZSL tasks? Third, we observe that only a few dimensions of the learnt features gain high variances whereas most of the remaining dimensions are not informative. Thus, the question is how to make the concentrated information diffuse to most of the dimensions of synthesised data. To address the above issues, we propose a novel embedding algorithm named Unseen Visual Data Synthesis (UVDS) that projects semantic features to the high-dimensional visual feature space. Two main techniques are introduced in our proposed algorithm. (1) We introduce a latent embedding space which aims to reconcile the structural difference between the visual and semantic spaces, meanwhile preserve the local structure. (2) We propose a novel Diffusion Regularisation (DR) that explicitly forces the variances to diffuse over most dimensions of the synthesised data. By an orthogonal rotation (more precisely, an orthogonal transformation), DR can remove the redundant correlated attributes and further alleviate the over-fitting problem. On four benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the benefit of using synthesised unseen data for zero-shot learning. Extensive experimental results suggest that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Existing zero-shot learning (ZSL) models typically learn a projection function from a feature space to a semantic embedding space (e.g. attribute space). However, such a projection function is only concerned with predicting the training seen class semantic representation (e.g. attribute prediction) or classification. When applied to test data, which in the context of ZSL contains different (unseen) classes without training data, a ZSL model typically suffers from the project domain shift problem. In this work, we present a novel solution to ZSL based on learning a Semantic AutoEncoder (SAE). Taking the encoder-decoder paradigm, an encoder aims to project a visual feature vector into the semantic space as in the existing ZSL models. However, the decoder exerts an additional constraint, that is, the projection code must be able to reconstruct the original visual feature. We show that with this additional reconstruction constraint, the learned projection function from the seen classes is able to generalise better to the new unseen classes. Importantly, the encoder and decoder are linear and symmetric which enable us to develop an extremely efficient learning algorithm. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SAE outperforms significantly the existing ZSL models with the additional benefit of lower computational cost. Furthermore, when the SAE is applied to supervised clustering problem, it also beats the state-of-the-art. Existing zero-shot learning (ZSL) models typically learn a projection function from a feature space to a semantic embedding space (e.g. attribute space). However, such a projection function is only concerned with predicting the training seen class semantic representation (e.g. attribute prediction) or classification. When applied to test data, which in the context of ZSL contains different (unseen) classes without training data, a ZSL model typically suffers from the project domain shift problem. In this work, we present a novel solution to ZSL based on learning a Semantic AutoEncoder (SAE). Taking the encoder-decoder paradigm, an encoder aims to project a visual feature vector into the semantic space as in the existing ZSL models. However, the decoder exerts an additional constraint, that is, the projection code must be able to reconstruct the original visual feature. We show that with this additional reconstruction constraint, the learned projection function from the seen classes is able to generalise better to the new unseen classes. Importantly, the encoder and decoder are linear and symmetric which enable us to develop an extremely efficient learning algorithm. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SAE outperforms significantly the existing ZSL models with the additional benefit of lower computational cost. Furthermore, when the SAE is applied to supervised clustering problem, it also beats the state-of-the-art. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) can be considered as a special case of transfer learning where the source and target domains have different tasks label spaces and the target domain is unlabelled, providing little guidance for the knowledge transfer. A ZSL method typically assumes that the two domains share a common semantic representation space, where a visual feature vector extracted from an image video can be projected embedded using a projection function. Existing approaches learn the projection function from the source domain and apply it without adaptation to the target domain. They are thus based on naive knowledge transfer and the learned projections are prone to the domain shift problem. In this paper a novel ZSL method is proposed based on unsupervised domain adaptation. Specifically, we formulate a novel regularised sparse coding framework which uses the target domain class labels' projections in the semantic space to regularise the learned target domain projection thus effectively overcoming the projection domain shift problem. Extensive experiments on four object and action recognition benchmark datasets show that the proposed ZSL method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts. With the sustaining bloom of multimedia data, Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) techniques have attracted much attention in recent years for its ability to train learning models that can handle “unseen” categories. Existing ZSL algorithms mainly take advantages of attribute-based semantic space and only focus on static image data. Besides, most ZSL studies merely consider the semantic embedded labels and fail to address domain shift problem. In this paper, we purpose a deep two-output model for video ZSL and action recognition tasks by computing both spatial and temporal features from video contents through distinct Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and training a Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) upon extracted features to map videos to semantic embedding word vectors. Moreover, we introduce a domain adaptation strategy named “ConSSEV” — by combining outputs from two distinct output layers of our MLP to improve the results of zero-shot learning. Our experiments on UCF101 dataset demonstrate the purposed model has more advantages associated with more complex video embedding schemes, and outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot learning techniques. General zero-shot learning (ZSL) approaches exploit transfer learning via semantic knowledge space. In this paper, we reveal a novel relational knowledge transfer (RKT) mechanism for ZSL, which is simple, generic and effective. RKT resolves the inherent semantic shift problem existing in ZSL through restoring the missing manifold structure of unseen categories via optimizing semantic mapping. It extracts the relational knowledge from data manifold structure in semantic knowledge space based on sparse coding theory. The extracted knowledge is then transferred backwards to generate virtual data for unseen categories in the feature space. On the one hand, the generalizing ability of the semantic mapping function can be enhanced with the added data. On the other hand, the mapping function for unseen categories can be learned directly from only these generated data, achieving inspiring performance. Incorporated with RKT, even simple baseline methods can achieve good results. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets show prominent performance obtained by RKT, and we obtain 82.43 accuracy on the Animals with Attributes dataset. The number of categories for action recognition is growing rapidly and it has become increasingly hard to label sufficient training data for learning conventional models for all categories. Instead of collecting ever more data and labelling them exhaustively for all categories, an attractive alternative approach is "zero-shot learning" (ZSL). To that end, in this study we construct a mapping between visual features and a semantic descriptor of each action category, allowing new categories to be recognised in the absence of any visual training data. Existing ZSL studies focus primarily on still images, and attribute-based semantic representations. In this work, we explore word-vectors as the shared semantic space to embed videos and category labels for ZSL action recognition. This is a more challenging problem than existing ZSL of still images and or attributes, because the mapping between video space-time features of actions and the semantic space is more complex and harder to learn for the purpose of generalising over any cross-category domain shift. To solve this generalisation problem in ZSL action recognition, we investigate a series of synergistic strategies to improve upon the standard ZSL pipeline. Most of these strategies are transductive in nature which means access to testing data in the training phase. First, we enhance significantly the semantic space mapping by proposing manifold-regularized regression and data augmentation strategies. Second, we evaluate two existing post processing strategies (transductive self-training and hubness correction), and show that they are complementary. We evaluate extensively our model on a wide range of human action datasets including HMDB51, UCF101, Olympic Sports and event datasets including CCV and TRECVID MED 13. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art zero-shot action recognition performance with a simple and efficient pipeline, and without supervised annotation of attributes. Finally, we present in-depth analysis into why and when zero-shot works, including demonstrating the ability to predict cross-category transferability in advance. Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) promises to scale visual recognition by bypassing the conventional model training requirement of annotated examples for every category. This is achieved by establishing a mapping connecting low-level features and a semantic description of the label space, referred as visual-semantic mapping, on auxiliary data. Re-using the learned mapping to project target videos into an embedding space thus allows novel-classes to be recognised by nearest neighbour inference. However, existing ZSL methods suffer from auxiliary-target domain shift intrinsically induced by assuming the same mapping for the disjoint auxiliary and target classes. This compromises the generalisation accuracy of ZSL recognition on the target data. In this work, we improve the ability of ZSL to generalise across this domain shift in both model- and data-centric ways by formulating a visual-semantic mapping with better generalisation properties and a dynamic data re-weighting method to prioritise auxiliary data that are relevant to the target classes. Specifically: (1) We introduce a multi-task visual-semantic mapping to improve generalisation by constraining the semantic mapping parameters to lie on a low-dimensional manifold, (2) We explore prioritised data augmentation by expanding the pool of auxiliary data with additional instances weighted by relevance to the target domain. The proposed new model is applied to the challenging zero-shot action recognition problem to demonstrate its advantages over existing ZSL models. We propose a novel approach for unsupervised zero-shot learning (ZSL) of classes based on their names. Most existing unsupervised ZSL methods aim to learn a model for directly comparing image features and class names. However, this proves to be a difficult task due to dominance of non-visual semantics in underlying vector-space embeddings of class names. To address this issue, we discriminatively learn a word representation such that the similarities between class and combination of attribute names fall in line with the visual similarity. Contrary to the traditional zero-shot learning approaches that are built upon attribute presence, our approach bypasses the laborious attribute-class relation annotations for unseen classes. In addition, our proposed approach renders text-only training possible, hence, the training can be augmented without the need to collect additional image data. The experimental results show that our method yields state-of-the-art results for unsupervised ZSL in three benchmark datasets. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen object classes without any training samples, which can be regarded as a form of transfer learning from seen classes to unseen ones. This is made possible by learning a projection between a feature space and a semantic space (e.g. attribute space). Key to ZSL is thus to learn a projection function that is robust against the often large domain gap between the seen and unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a novel ZSL model termed domain-invariant projection learning (DIPL). Our model has two novel components: (1) A domain-invariant feature self-reconstruction task is introduced to the seen unseen class data, resulting in a simple linear formulation that casts ZSL into a min-min optimization problem. Solving the problem is non-trivial, and a novel iterative algorithm is formulated as the solver, with rigorous theoretic algorithm analysis provided. (2) To further align the two domains via the learned projection, shared semantic structure among seen and unseen classes is explored via forming superclasses in the semantic space. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives by significant margins. Existing image classification systems often suffer from re-training models for novel unseen classes. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognise these unseen classes directly using trained models with a further inference procedure. However, existing approaches highly rely on human-defined class-attribute associations to achieve the inference, which significantly increases the annotation cost. This paper aims to address ZSL on non-attribute tasks, i.e. only training images with labels are used as most of the supervised settings. Our main contributions are: 1) to circumvent expensive attributes, we propose to use semantic similes that directly indicate the unseen-to-seen associations; 2) a novel similarity-based representation is proposed to represent both visual images and semantic similes in a unified embedding space; 3) in order to reduce the annotation cost, we use only a few similes to infer a class-level prototype for each unseen class. On two popular benchmarks, AwA and aPY, extensive experiments manifest that our method can significantly improve the state-of-the-art results using only two similes for each unseen class. Furthermore, we revisit the Caltech 101 dataset without attributes. Our ZSL results can exceed that of previous supervised methods. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize objects of novel classes without any training samples of specific classes, which is achieved by exploiting the semantic information and auxiliary datasets. Recently most ZSL approaches focus on learning visual-semantic embeddings to transfer knowledge from the auxiliary datasets to the novel classes. However, few works study whether the semantic information is discriminative or not for the recognition task. To tackle such problem, we propose a coupled dictionary learning approach to align the visual-semantic structures using the class prototypes, where the discriminative information lying in the visual space is utilized to improve the less discriminative semantic space. Then, zero-shot recognition can be performed in different spaces by the simple nearest neighbor approach using the learned class prototypes. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We propose a novel framework called Semantics-Preserving Adversarial Embedding Network (SP-AEN) for zero-shot visual recognition (ZSL), where test images and their classes are both unseen during training. SP-AEN aims to tackle the inherent problem --- semantic loss --- in the prevailing family of embedding-based ZSL, where some semantics would be discarded during training if they are non-discriminative for training classes, but could become critical for recognizing test classes. Specifically, SP-AEN prevents the semantic loss by introducing an independent visual-to-semantic space embedder which disentangles the semantic space into two subspaces for the two arguably conflicting objectives: classification and reconstruction. Through adversarial learning of the two subspaces, SP-AEN can transfer the semantics from the reconstructive subspace to the discriminative one, accomplishing the improved zero-shot recognition of unseen classes. Comparing with prior works, SP-AEN can not only improve classification but also generate photo-realistic images, demonstrating the effectiveness of semantic preservation. On four popular benchmarks: CUB, AWA, SUN and aPY, SP-AEN considerably outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by an absolute performance difference of 12.2 , 9.3 , 4.0 , and 3.6 in terms of harmonic mean values Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen image categories by learning an embedding space between image and semantic representations. For years, among existing works, it has been the center task to learn the proper mapping matrices aligning the visual and semantic space, whilst the importance to learn discriminative representations for ZSL is ignored. In this work, we retrospect existing methods and demonstrate the necessity to learn discriminative representations for both visual and semantic instances of ZSL. We propose an end-to-end network that is capable of 1) automatically discovering discriminative regions by a zoom network; and 2) learning discriminative semantic representations in an augmented space introduced for both user-defined and latent attributes. Our proposed method is tested extensively on two challenging ZSL datasets, and the experiment results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen image categories by learning an embedding space between image and semantic representations. For years, among existing works, it has been the center task to learn the proper mapping matrices aligning the visual and semantic space, whilst the importance to learn discriminative representations for ZSL is ignored. In this work, we retrospect existing methods and demonstrate the necessity to learn discriminative representations for both visual and semantic instances of ZSL. We propose an end-to-end network that is capable of 1) automatically discovering discriminative regions by a zoom network; and 2) learning discriminative semantic representations in an augmented space introduced for both user-defined and latent attributes. Our proposed method is tested extensively on two challenging ZSL datasets, and the experiment results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.