A visual-relational knowledge graph (KG) is a multi-relational graph whose entities are associated with images. We explore novel machine learning approaches for answering visual-relational queries in web-extracted knowledge graphs. To this end, we have created ImageGraph, a KG with 1,330 relation types, 14,870 entities, and 829,931 images crawled from the web. With visual-relational KGs such as ImageGraph one can introduce novel probabilistic query types in which images are treated as first-class citizens. Both the prediction of relations between unseen images as well as multi-relational image retrieval can be expressed with specific families of visual-relational queries. We introduce novel combinations of convolutional networks and knowledge graph embedding methods to answer such queries. We also explore a zero-shot learning scenario where an image of an entirely new entity is linked with multiple relations to entities of an existing KG. The resulting multi-relational grounding of unseen entity images into a knowledge graph serves as a semantic entity representation. We conduct experiments to demonstrate that the proposed methods can answer these visual-relational queries efficiently and accurately.
We focus on exploring ways in which KGs can be used to find relationships between visual data of unseen entities, that is, entities not part of the KG during training, and visual data of known KG entities. This is a form of zero-shot learning (ZSL) where the objective is to generalize to novel visual concepts. Generally, ZSL methods ( @cite_48 @cite_25 ) rely on an underlying embedding space, such as one based on visual attributes, to recognize unseen categories. With this paper, we do not assume the availability of such a common embedding space but we assume the existence of an external visual-relational KG. Similar to our approach, when this explicit knowledge is not encoded in the underlying embedding space, other works rely on finding the similarities through linguistic patterns ( @cite_14 @cite_29 ), leveraging distributional word representations so as to capture a notion of similarity. These approaches, however, address scene understanding in a single image, these models are able to detect the visual relationships in one given image. Our approach, on the other hand, finds relationships between different images and entities.
@cite_48 @cite_29 @cite_14 @cite_25
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We consider the problem of zero-shot recognition: learning a visual classifier for a category with zero training examples, just using the word embedding of the category and its relationship to other categories, which visual data are provided. The key to dealing with the unfamiliar or novel category is to transfer knowledge obtained from familiar classes to describe the unfamiliar class. In this paper, we build upon the recently introduced Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and propose an approach that uses both semantic embeddings and the categorical relationships to predict the classifiers. Given a learned knowledge graph (KG), our approach takes as input semantic embeddings for each node (representing visual category). After a series of graph convolutions, we predict the visual classifier for each category. During training, the visual classifiers for a few categories are given to learn the GCN parameters. At test time, these filters are used to predict the visual classifiers of unseen categories. We show that our approach is robust to noise in the KG. More importantly, our approach provides significant improvement in performance compared to the current state-of-the-art results (from 2 3 on some metrics to whopping 20 on a few). 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. 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. Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have been applied to many tasks including Web search, link prediction, recommendation, natural language processing, and entity linking. However, most KGs are far from complete and are growing at a rapid pace. To address these problems, Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) has been proposed to improve KGs by filling in its missing connections. Unlike existing methods which hold a closed-world assumption, i.e., where KGs are fixed and new entities cannot be easily added, in the present work we relax this assumption and propose a new open-world KGC task. As a first attempt to solve this task we introduce an open-world KGC model called ConMask. This model learns embeddings of the entity's name and parts of its text-description to connect unseen entities to the KG. To mitigate the presence of noisy text descriptions, ConMask uses a relationship-dependent content masking to extract relevant snippets and then trains a fully convolutional neural network to fuse the extracted snippets with entities in the KG. Experiments on large data sets, both old and new, show that ConMask performs well in the open-world KGC task and even outperforms existing KGC models on the standard closed-world KGC task. Understanding the visual relationship between two objects involves identifying the subject, the object, and a predicate relating them. We leverage the strong correlations between the predicate and the hsubj; obji pair (both semantically and spatially) to predict predicates conditioned on the subjects and the objects. Modeling the three entities jointly more accurately reflects their relationships compared to modeling them independently, but it complicates learning since the semantic space of visual relationships is huge and training data is limited, especially for longtail relationships that have few instances. To overcome this, we use knowledge of linguistic statistics to regularize visual model learning. We obtain linguistic knowledge by mining from both training annotations (internal knowledge) and publicly available text, e.g., Wikipedia (external knowledge), computing the conditional probability distribution of a predicate given a (subj, obj) pair. As we train the visual model, we distill this knowledge into the deep model to achieve better generalization. Our experimental results on the Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) and Visual Genome datasets suggest that with this linguistic knowledge distillation, our model outperforms the stateof- the-art methods significantly, especially when predicting unseen relationships (e.g., recall improved from 8.45 to 19.17 on VRD zero-shot testing set). 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. 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. Knowledge graph (KG) embedding is to embed components of a KG including entities and relations into continuous vector spaces, so as to simplify the manipulation while preserving the inherent structure of the KG. It can benefit a variety of downstream tasks such as KG completion and relation extraction, and hence has quickly gained massive attention. In this article, we provide a systematic review of existing techniques, including not only the state-of-the-arts but also those with latest trends. Particularly, we make the review based on the type of information used in the embedding task. Techniques that conduct embedding using only facts observed in the KG are first introduced. We describe the overall framework, specific model design, typical training procedures, as well as pros and cons of such techniques. After that, we discuss techniques that further incorporate additional information besides facts. We focus specifically on the use of entity types, relation paths, textual descriptions, and logical rules. Finally, we briefly introduce how KG embedding can be applied to and benefit a wide variety of downstream tasks such as KG completion, relation extraction, question answering, and so forth. 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 recognition aims to accurately recognize objects of unseen classes by using a shared visual-semantic mapping between the image feature space and the semantic embedding space. This mapping is learned on training data of seen classes and is expected to have transfer ability to unseen classes. In this paper, we tackle this problem by exploiting the intrinsic relationship between the semantic space manifold and the transfer ability of visual-semantic mapping. We formalize their connection and cast zero-shot recognition as a joint optimization problem. Motivated by this, we propose a novel framework for zero-shot recognition, which contains dual visual-semantic mapping paths. Our analysis shows this framework can not only apply prior semantic knowledge to infer underlying semantic manifold in the image feature space, but also generate optimized semantic embedding space, which can enhance the transfer ability of the visual-semantic mapping to unseen classes. The proposed method is evaluated for zero-shot recognition on four benchmark datasets, achieving outstanding results. Collecting training images for all visual categories is not only expensive but also impractical. Zero-shot learning (ZSL), especially using attributes, offers a pragmatic solution to this problem. However, at test time most attribute-based methods require a full description of attribute associations for each unseen class. Providing these associations is time consuming and often requires domain specific knowledge. In this work, we aim to carry out attribute-based zero-shot classification in an unsupervised manner. We propose an approach to learn relations that couples class embeddings with their corresponding attributes. Given only the name of an unseen class, the learned relationship model is used to automatically predict the class-attribute associations. Furthermore, our model facilitates transferring attributes across data sets without additional effort. Integrating knowledge from multiple sources results in a significant additional improvement in performance. We evaluate on two public data sets: Animals with Attributes and aPascal aYahoo. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both predicting class-attribute associations and unsupervised ZSL by a large margin. We seek to detect visual relations in images of the form of triplets t = (subject, predicate, object), such as "person riding dog", where training examples of the individual entities are available but their combinations are rare or unseen at training. This is an important set-up due to the combinatorial nature of visual relations : collecting sufficient training data for all possible triplets would be very hard. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we learn a representation of visual relations that combines (i) individual embeddings for subject, object and predicate together with (ii) a visual phrase embedding that represents the relation triplet. Second, we learn how to transfer visual phrase embeddings from existing training triplets to unseen test triplets using analogies between relations that involve similar objects. Third, we demonstrate the benefits of our approach on two challenging datasets involving rare and unseen relations : on HICO-DET, our model achieves significant improvement over a strong baseline, and we confirm this improvement on retrieval of unseen triplets on the UnRel rare relation dataset. Research has seen considerable achievements concerning translation of natural language patterns into formal queries for Question Answering (QA) based on Knowledge Graphs (KG). One of the main challenges in this research area is about how to identify which property within a Knowledge Graph matches the predicate found in a Natural Language (NL) relation. Current approaches for formal query generation attempt to resolve this problem mainly by first retrieving the named entity from the KG together with a list of its predicates, then filtering out one from all the predicates of the entity. We attempt an approach to directly match an NL predicate to KG properties that can be employed within QA pipelines. In this paper, we specify a systematic approach as well as providing a tool that can be employed to solve this task. Our approach models KB relations with their underlying parts of speech, we then enhance this with extra attributes obtained from Wordnet and Dependency parsing characteristics. From a question, we model a similar representation of query relations. We then define distance measurements between the query relation and the properties representations from the KG to identify which property is referred to by the relation within the query. We report substantive recall values and considerable precision from our evaluation. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is to construct recognition models for unseen target classes that have no labeled samples for training. It utilizes the class attributes or semantic vectors as side information and transfers supervision information from related source classes with abundant labeled samples. Existing ZSL approaches adopt an intermediary embedding space to measure the similarity between a sample and the attributes of a target class to perform zero-shot classification. However, this way may suffer from the information loss caused by the embedding process and the similarity measure cannot fully make use of the data distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach which turns the ZSL problem into a conventional supervised learning problem by synthesizing samples for the unseen classes. Firstly, the probability distribution of an unseen class is estimated by using the knowledge from seen classes and the class attributes. Secondly, the samples are synthesized based on the distribution for the unseen class. Finally, we can train any supervised classifiers based on the synthesized samples. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach to the state-of-the-art ZSL approaches. Zero-shot learning for visual recognition, e.g., object and action recognition, has recently attracted a lot of attention. However, it still remains challenging in bridging the semantic gap between visual features and their underlying semantics and transferring knowledge to semantic categories unseen during learning. Unlike most of the existing zero-shot visual recognition methods, we propose a stagewise bidirectional latent embedding framework to two subsequent learning stages for zero-shot visual recognition. In the bottom-up stage, a latent embedding space is first created by exploring the topological and labeling information underlying training data of known classes via a proper supervised subspace learning algorithm and the latent embedding of training data are used to form landmarks that guide embedding semantics underlying unseen classes into this learned latent space. In the top-down stage, semantic representations of unseen-class labels in a given label vocabulary are then embedded to the same latent space to preserve the semantic relatedness between all different classes via our proposed semi-supervised Sammon mapping with the guidance of landmarks. Thus, the resultant latent embedding space allows for predicting the label of a test instance with a simple nearest-neighbor rule. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we have conducted extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets in object and action recognition, i.e., AwA, CUB-200-2011, UCF101 and HMDB51. The experimental results under comparative studies demonstrate that our proposed approach yields the state-of-the-art performance under inductive and transductive settings. Zero-shot learning for visual recognition, e.g., object and action recognition, has recently attracted a lot of attention. However, it still remains challenging in bridging the semantic gap between visual features and their underlying semantics and transferring knowledge to semantic categories unseen during learning. Unlike most of the existing zero-shot visual recognition methods, we propose a stagewise bidirectional latent embedding framework of two subsequent learning stages for zero-shot visual recognition. In the bottom–up stage, a latent embedding space is first created by exploring the topological and labeling information underlying training data of known classes via a proper supervised subspace learning algorithm and the latent embedding of training data are used to form landmarks that guide embedding semantics underlying unseen classes into this learned latent space. In the top–down stage, semantic representations of unseen-class labels in a given label vocabulary are then embedded to the same latent space to preserve the semantic relatedness between all different classes via our proposed semi-supervised Sammon mapping with the guidance of landmarks. Thus, the resultant latent embedding space allows for predicting the label of a test instance with a simple nearest-neighbor rule. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we have conducted extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets in object and action recognition, i.e., AwA, CUB-200-2011, UCF101 and HMDB51. The experimental results under comparative studies demonstrate that our proposed approach yields the state-of-the-art performance under inductive and transductive settings. Zero-shot learning, which studies the problem of object classification for categories for which we have no training examples, is gaining increasing attention from community. Most existing ZSL methods exploit deterministic transfer learning via an in-between semantic embedding space. In this paper, we try to attack this problem from a generative probabilistic modelling perspective. We assume for any category, the observed representation, e.g. images or texts, is developed from a unique prototype in a latent space, in which the semantic relationship among prototypes is encoded via linear reconstruction. Taking advantage of this assumption, virtual instances of unseen classes can be generated from the corresponding prototype, giving rise to a novel ZSL model which can alleviate the domain shift problem existing in the way of direct transfer learning. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show our proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art results. 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. The representation of a knowledge graph (KG) in a latent space recently has attracted more and more attention. To this end, some proposed models (e.g., TransE) embed entities and relations of a KG into a "point" vector space by optimizing a global loss function which ensures the scores of positive triplets are higher than negative ones. We notice that these models always regard all entities and relations in a same manner and ignore their (un)certainties. In fact, different entities and relations may contain different certainties, which makes identical certainty insufficient for modeling. Therefore, this paper switches to density-based embedding and propose KG2E for explicitly modeling the certainty of entities and relations, which learn the representations of KGs in the space of multi-dimensional Gaussian distributions. Each entity relation is represented by a Gaussian distribution, where the mean denotes its position and the covariance (currently with diagonal covariance) can properly represent its certainty. In addition, compared with the symmetric measures used in point-based methods, we employ the KL-divergence for scoring triplets, which is a natural asymmetry function for effectively modeling multiple types of relations. We have conducted extensive experiments on link prediction and triplet classification with multiple benchmark datasets (WordNet and Freebase). Our experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively model the (un)certainties of entities and relations in a KG, and it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods (including TransH and TransR). 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.