Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is made possible by learning a projection function between a feature space and a semantic space (e.g., an attribute space). Key to ZSL is thus to learn a projection that is robust against the often large domain gap between the seen and unseen class domains. In this work, this is achieved by unseen class data synthesis and robust projection function learning. Specifically, a novel semantic data synthesis strategy is proposed, by which semantic class prototypes (e.g., attribute vectors) are used to simply perturb seen class data for generating unseen class ones. As in any data synthesis hallucination approach, there are ambiguities and uncertainties on how well the synthesised data can capture the targeted unseen class data distribution. To cope with this, the second contribution of this work is a novel projection learning model termed competitive bidirectional projection learning (BPL) designed to best utilise the ambiguous synthesised data. Specifically, we assume that each synthesised data point can belong to any unseen class; and the most likely two class candidates are exploited to learn a robust projection function in a competitive fashion. As a third contribution, we show that the proposed ZSL model can be easily extended to few-shot learning (FSL) by again exploiting semantic (class prototype guided) feature synthesis and competitive BPL. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art results on both problems.
Few-Shot Learning As a related problem to ZSL, few-shot learning (FSL) @cite_61 @cite_28 @cite_10 assumes that a handful (typically 1-5) labelled examples exist for target novel classes. Such a data sparsity issue challenges the standard fine-tuning strategy used in deep learning. Data augmentation can alleviate the issue, but does not solve it. Recent FSL approaches thus choose to transform the deep network training process to meta-learning where the transferrable knowledge is learned in the form of good initial conditions, embeddings, or optimisation strategies @cite_49 @cite_18 @cite_30 @cite_31 . However, meta-learning based models typically cannot scale to large number of classes training samples. This motivated the more recent approaches based on classifier parameter prediction with activations @cite_10 and data synthesis based FSL @cite_60 @cite_63 @cite_35 . In this work, our ZSL model is seamlessly extended to FSL. Since it is data synthesis based, it is related to @cite_60 @cite_63 @cite_35 , but is again distinctive in the semantic feature synthesis by pertubation (SFSP) strategy and its ability to cope with the ambiguity in the synthesised data. We show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art FSL alternatives @cite_10 @cite_60 , particularly on large-scale FSL tasks (see Fig. ).
@cite_61 @cite_30 @cite_18 @cite_35 @cite_60 @cite_28 @cite_49 @cite_63 @cite_31 @cite_10
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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. 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. 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.