We present a generative framework for generalized zero-shot learning where the training and test classes are not necessarily disjoint. Built upon a variational autoencoder based architecture, consisting of a probabilistic encoder and a probabilistic conditional decoder, our model can generate novel exemplars from seen unseen classes, given their respective class attributes. These exemplars can subsequently be used to train any off-the-shelf classification model. One of the key aspects of our encoder-decoder architecture is a feedback-driven mechanism in which a discriminator (a multivariate regressor) learns to map the generated exemplars to the corresponding class attribute vectors, leading to an improved generator. Our model's ability to generate and leverage examples from unseen classes to train the classification model naturally helps to mitigate the bias towards predicting seen classes in generalized zero-shot learning settings. Through a comprehensive set of experiments, we show that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, on several benchmark datasets, for both standard as well as generalized zero-shot learning.
The generalized ZSL problem @cite_25 @cite_32 where the training and test classes are not disjoint is considerably more challenging as compared to the traditional ZSL, and a recent focus has been to design ZSL methods that can work robustly in this setting without being biased towards predicting seen classes. Generative models @cite_5 @cite_14 @cite_28 @cite_9 are promising in this setting. One of the ways these models can solve the GZSL problem is by generating synthetic labeled examples from the unseen classes and then using these examples (and the labeled examples from other seen classes) to train a classification model.
@cite_14 @cite_28 @cite_9 @cite_32 @cite_5 @cite_25
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We investigate the problem of generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL). GZSL relaxes the unrealistic assumption in conventional zero-shot learning (ZSL) that test data belong only to unseen novel classes. In GZSL, test data might also come from seen classes and the labeling space is the union of both types of classes. We show empirically that a straightforward application of classifiers provided by existing ZSL approaches does not perform well in the setting of GZSL. Motivated by this, we propose a surprisingly simple but effective method to adapt ZSL approaches for GZSL. The main idea is to introduce a calibration factor to calibrate the classifiers for both seen and unseen classes so as to balance two conflicting forces: recognizing data from seen classes and those from unseen ones. We develop a new performance metric called the Area Under Seen-Unseen accuracy Curve to characterize this trade-off. We demonstrate the utility of this metric by analyzing existing ZSL approaches applied to the generalized setting. Extensive empirical studies reveal strengths and weaknesses of those approaches on three well-studied benchmark datasets, including the large-scale ImageNet with more than 20,000 unseen categories. We complement our comparative studies in learning methods by further establishing an upper bound on the performance limit of GZSL. In particular, our idea is to use class-representative visual features as the idealized semantic embeddings. We show that there is a large gap between the performance of existing approaches and the performance limit, suggesting that improving the quality of class semantic embeddings is vital to improving ZSL. We investigate the problem of generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL). GZSL relaxes the unrealistic assumption in conventional ZSL that test data belong only to unseen novel classes. In GZSL, test data might also come from seen classes and the labeling space is the union of both types of classes. We show empirically that a straightforward application of the classifiers provided by existing ZSL approaches does not perform well in the setting of GZSL. Motivated by this, we propose a surprisingly simple but effective method to adapt ZSL approaches for GZSL. The main idea is to introduce a calibration factor to calibrate the classifiers for both seen and unseen classes so as to balance two conflicting forces: recognizing data from seen classes and those from unseen ones. We develop a new performance metric called the Area Under Seen-Unseen accuracy Curve to characterize this tradeoff. We demonstrate the utility of this metric by analyzing existing ZSL approaches applied to the generalized setting. Extensive empirical studies reveal strengths and weaknesses of those approaches on three well-studied benchmark datasets, including the large-scale ImageNet Full 2011 with 21,000 unseen categories. We complement our comparative studies in learning methods by further establishing an upper-bound on the performance limit of GZSL. There, our idea is to use class-representative visual features as the idealized semantic embeddings. We show that there is a large gap between the performance of existing approaches and the performance limit, suggesting that improving the quality of class semantic embeddings is vital to improving zero-shot learning. This paper addresses the task of learning an image clas-sifier when some categories are defined by semantic descriptions only (e.g. visual attributes) while the others are defined by exemplar images as well. This task is often referred to as the Zero-Shot classification task (ZSC). Most of the previous methods rely on learning a common embedding space allowing to compare visual features of unknown categories with semantic descriptions. This paper argues that these approaches are limited as i) efficient discrimi-native classifiers can't be used ii) classification tasks with seen and unseen categories (Generalized Zero-Shot Classification or GZSC) can't be addressed efficiently. In contrast , this paper suggests to address ZSC and GZSC by i) learning a conditional generator using seen classes ii) generate artificial training examples for the categories without exemplars. ZSC is then turned into a standard supervised learning problem. Experiments with 4 generative models and 5 datasets experimentally validate the approach, giving state-of-the-art results on both ZSC and GZSC. 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.