Knowledge transfer, zero-shot learning and semantic image retrieval are methods that aim at improving accuracy by utilizing semantic information, e.g. from WordNet. It is assumed that this information can augment or replace missing visual data in the form of labeled training images because semantic similarity somewhat aligns with visual similarity. This assumption may seem trivial, but is crucial for the application of such semantic methods. Any violation can cause mispredictions. Thus, it is important to examine the visual-semantic relationship for a certain target problem. In this paper, we use five different semantic and visual similarity measures each to thoroughly analyze the relationship without relying too much on any single definition. We postulate and verify three highly consequential hypotheses on the relationship. Our results show that it indeed exists and that WordNet semantic similarity carries more information about visual similarity than just the knowledge of "different classes look different". They suggest that classification is not the ideal application for semantic methods and that wrong semantic information is much worse than none.
Rodner al show a method that trains Gaussian processes from few examples in @cite_32 . It uses knowledge transfer between related classes to enable few-shot learning with reasonable accuracy. The WordNet hierarchy @cite_11 supplies the relationships between concepts that are ultimately used to steer the knowledge transfer. When compared to individual GP learning of classes, knowledge transfer improves accuracy.
@cite_32 @cite_11
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Knowledge transfer from related object categories is a key concept to allow learning with few training examples. We present how to use dependent Gaussian processes for transferring knowledge from a related category in a non-parametric Bayesian way. Our method is able to select this category automatically using efficient model selection techniques. We show how to optionally incorporate semantic similarities obtained from the hierarchical lexical database WordNet [1] into the selection process. The framework is applied to image categorization tasks using state-of-the-art image-based kernel functions. A large scale evaluation shows the benefits of our approach compared to independent learning and a SVM based approach. We propose to revisit knowledge transfer for training object detectors on target classes from weakly supervised training images, helped by a set of source classes with bounding-box annotations. We present a unified knowledge transfer framework based on training a single neural network multi-class object detector over all source classes, organized in a semantic hierarchy. This generates proposals with scores at multiple levels in the hierarchy, which we use to explore knowledge transfer over a broad range of generality, ranging from class-specific (bycicle to motorbike) to class-generic (objectness to any class). Experiments on the 200 object classes in the ILSVRC 2013 detection dataset show that our technique (1) leads to much better performance on the target classes (70.3 CorLoc, 36.9 mAP) than a weakly supervised baseline which uses manually engineered objectness [11] (50.5 CorLoc, 25.4 mAP). (2) delivers target object detectors reaching 80 of the mAP of their fully supervised counterparts. (3) outperforms the best reported transfer learning results on this dataset (+41 CorLoc and +3 mAP over [18, 46], +16.2 mAP over [32]). Moreover, we also carry out several across-dataset knowledge transfer experiments [27, 24, 35] and find that (4) our technique outperforms the weakly supervised baseline in all dataset pairs by 1.5 A— - 1.9A—, establishing its general applicability. We describe an approach to learning from long-tailed, imbalanced datasets that are prevalent in real-world settings. Here, the challenge is to learn accurate "few-shot'' models for classes in the tail of the class distribution, for which little data is available. We cast this problem as transfer learning, where knowledge from the data-rich classes in the head of the distribution is transferred to the data-poor classes in the tail. Our key insights are as follows. First, we propose to transfer meta-knowledge about learning-to-learn from the head classes. This knowledge is encoded with a meta-network that operates on the space of model parameters, that is trained to predict many-shot model parameters from few-shot model parameters. Second, we transfer this meta-knowledge in a progressive manner, from classes in the head to the "body'', and from the "body'' to the tail. That is, we transfer knowledge in a gradual fashion, regularizing meta-networks for few-shot regression with those trained with more training data. This allows our final network to capture a notion of model dynamics, that predicts how model parameters are likely to change as more training data is gradually added. We demonstrate results on image classification datasets (SUN, Places, and ImageNet) tuned for the long-tailed setting, that significantly outperform common heuristics, such as data resampling or reweighting. Transfer learning aims at reusing the knowledge in some source tasks to improve the learning of a target task. Many transfer learning methods assume that the source tasks and the target task be related, even though many tasks are not related in reality. However, when two tasks are unrelated, the knowledge extracted from a source task may not help, and even hurt, the performance of a target task. Thus, how to avoid negative transfer and then ensure a "safe transfer" of knowledge is crucial in transfer learning. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Transfer learning algorithm based on Gaussian Processes (AT-GP), which can be used to adapt the transfer learning schemes by automatically estimating the similarity between a source and a target task. The main contribution of our work is that we propose a new semi-parametric transfer kernel for transfer learning from a Bayesian perspective, and propose to learn the model with respect to the target task, rather than all tasks as in multi-task learning. We can formulate the transfer learning problem as a unified Gaussian Process (GP) model. The adaptive transfer ability of our approach is verified on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Scaling up visual category recognition to large numbers of classes remains challenging. A promising research direction is zero-shot learning, which does not require any training data to recognize new classes, but rather relies on some form of auxiliary information describing the new classes. Ultimately, this may allow to use textbook knowledge that humans employ to learn about new classes by transferring knowledge from classes they know well. The most successful zero-shot learning approaches currently require a particular type of auxiliary information – namely attribute annotations performed by humans – that is not readily available for most classes. Our goal is to circumvent this bottleneck by substituting such annotations by extracting multiple pieces of information from multiple unstructured text sources readily available on the web. To compensate for the weaker form of auxiliary information, we incorporate stronger supervision in the form of semantic part annotations on the classes from which we transfer knowledge. We achieve our goal by a joint embedding framework that maps multiple text parts as well as multiple semantic parts into a common space. Our results consistently and significantly improve on the state-of-the-art in zero-short recognition and retrieval. In this paper we aim for zero-shot classification, that is visual recognition of an unseen class by using knowledge transfer from known classes. Our main contribution is COSTA, which exploits co-occurrences of visual concepts in images for knowledge transfer. These inter-dependencies arise naturally between concepts, and are easy to obtain from existing annotations or web-search hit counts. We estimate a classifier for a new label, as a weighted combination of related classes, using the co-occurrences to define the weight. We propose various metrics to leverage these co-occurrences, and a regression model for learning a weight for each related class. We also show that our zero-shot classifiers can serve as priors for few-shot learning. Experiments on three multi-labeled datasets reveal that our proposed zero-shot methods, are approaching and occasionally outperforming fully supervised SVMs. We conclude that co-occurrence statistics suffice for zero-shot classification. We propose a method for knowledge transfer between semantically related classes in ImageNet. By transferring knowledge from the images that have bounding-box annotations to the others, our method is capable of automatically populating ImageNet with many more bounding-boxes. The underlying assumption that objects from semantically related classes look alike is formalized in our novel Associative Embedding (AE) representation. AE recovers the latent low-dimensional space of appearance variations among image windows. The dimensions of AE space tend to correspond to aspects of window appearance (e.g. side view, close up, background). We model the overlap of a window with an object using Gaussian Processes (GP) regression, which spreads annotation smoothly through AE space. The probabilistic nature of GP allows our method to perform self-assessment, i.e. assigning a quality estimate to its own output. It enables trading off the amount of returned annotations for their quality. A large scale experiment on 219 classes and 0.5 million images demonstrates that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and baselines for object localization. Using self-assessment we can automatically return bounding-box annotations for 51 of all images with high localization accuracy (i.e. 71 average overlap with ground-truth). A new deep multitask learning based metric learning method is proposed.An appropriate architecture is proposed for offline signature verification.The knowledge of other signers' samples is transfered for better accuracy.The proposed method outperforms SVM and Discriminative Deep Metric Learning.It outperforms the accuracy of other published reports. Display Omitted This paper presents a novel classification method, Deep Multitask Metric Learning (DMML), for offline signature verification. Unlike existing methods that to verify questioned signatures of an individual merely consider the training samples of that class, DMML uses the knowledge from the similarities and dissimilarities between the genuine and forged samples of other classes too. To this end, using the idea of multitask and transfer learning, DMML train a distance metric for each class together with other classes simultaneously. DMML has a structure with a shared layer acting as a writer-independent approach, that is followed by separated layers which learn writer-dependent factors. We compare the proposed method against SVM, writer-dependent and writer-independent Discriminative Deep Metric Learning method on four offline signature datasets (UTSig, MCYT-75, GPDSsynthetic, and GPDS960GraySignatures) using Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and Discrete Radon Transform (DRT) features. Results of our experiments show that DMML achieves better performance compared to other methods in verifying genuine signatures, skilled and random forgeries. One-class classification aims at constructing a distinctive classifier based on one class of examples. Most of the existing one-class classification methods are proposed based on the assumptions that: (1) there are a large number of training examples available for learning the classifier; (2) the training examples can be explicitly collected and hence do not contain any uncertain information. However, in real-world applications, these assumptions are not always satisfied. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called uncertain one-class transfer learning with support vector machine (UOCT-SVM), which is capable of constructing an accurate classifier on the target task by transferring knowledge from multiple source tasks whose data may contain uncertain information. In UOCT-SVM, the optimization function is formulated to deal with uncertain data and transfer learning based on one-class SVM. Then, an iterative framework is proposed to solve the optimization function. Extensive experiments have showed that UOCT-SVM can mitigate the effect of uncertain data on the decision boundary and transfer knowledge from source tasks to help build an accurate classifier on the target task, compared with state-of-the-art one-class classification methods. 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). 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. Remarkable performance has been reported to recognize single object classes. Scalability to large numbers of classes however remains an important challenge for today's recognition methods. Several authors have promoted knowledge transfer between classes as a key ingredient to address this challenge. However, in previous work the decision which knowledge to transfer has required either manual supervision or at least a few training examples limiting the scalability of these approaches. In this work we explicitly address the question of how to automatically decide which information to transfer between classes without the need of any human intervention. For this we tap into linguistic knowledge bases to provide the semantic link between sources (what) and targets (where) of knowledge transfer. We provide a rigorous experimental evaluation of different knowledge bases and state-of-the-art techniques from Natural Language Processing which goes far beyond the limited use of language in related work. We also give insights into the applicability (why) of different knowledge sources and similarity measures for knowledge transfer. Category models for objects or activities typically rely on supervised learning requiring sufficiently large training sets. Transferring knowledge from known categories to novel classes with no or only a few labels is far less researched even though it is a common scenario. In this work, we extend transfer learning with semi-supervised learning to exploit unlabeled instances of (novel) categories with no or only a few labeled instances. Our proposed approach Propagated Semantic Transfer combines three techniques. First, we transfer information from known to novel categories by incorporating external knowledge, such as linguistic or expert-specified information, e.g., by a mid-level layer of semantic attributes. Second, we exploit the manifold structure of novel classes. More specifically we adapt a graph-based learning algorithm - so far only used for semi-supervised learning -to zero-shot and few-shot learning. Third, we improve the local neighborhood in such graph structures by replacing the raw feature-based representation with a mid-level object- or attribute-based representation. We evaluate our approach on three challenging datasets in two different applications, namely on Animals with Attributes and ImageNet for image classification and on MPII Composites for activity recognition. Our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art transfer and semi-supervised approaches on all datasets. This paper studies the one-shot and zero-shot learning problems, where each object category has only one training example or has no training example at all. We approach this problem by transferring knowledge from known categories (a.k.a source categories) to new categories (a.k.a target categories) via object attributes. Object attributes are high level descriptions of object categories, such as color, texture, shape, etc. Since they represent common properties across different categories, they can be used to transfer knowledge from source categories to target categories effectively. Based on this insight, we propose an attribute-based transfer learning framework in this paper. We first build a generative attribute model to learn the probabilistic distributions of image features for each attribute, which we consider as attribute priors. These attribute priors can be used to (1) classify unseen images of target categories (zero-shot learning), or (2) facilitate learning classifiers for target categories when there is only one training examples per target category (one-shot learning). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches using the Animal with Attributes data set and show state-of-the-art performance in both zero-shot and one-shot learning tests. In this paper, we present a label transfer model from texts to images for image classification tasks. The problem of image classification is often much more challenging than text classification. On one hand, labeled text data is more widely available than the labeled images for classification tasks. On the other hand, text data tends to have natural semantic interpretability, and they are often more directly related to class labels. On the contrary, the image features are not directly related to concepts inherent in class labels. One of our goals in this paper is to develop a model for revealing the functional relationships between text and image features as to directly transfer intermodal and intramodal labels to annotate the images. This is implemented by learning a transfer function as a bridge to propagate the labels between two multimodal spaces. However, the intermodal label transfers could be undermined by blindly transferring the labels of noisy texts to annotate images. To mitigate this problem, we present an intramodal label transfer process, which complements the intermodal label transfer by transferring the image labels instead when relevant text is absent from the source corpus. In addition, we generalize the inter-modal label transfer to zero-shot learning scenario where there are only text examples available to label unseen classes of images without any positive image examples. We evaluate our algorithm on an image classification task and show the effectiveness with respect to the other compared algorithms. 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. Knowledge transfer between tasks can improve the performance of learned models, but requires an accurate estimate of the inter-task relationships to identify the relevant knowledge to transfer. These inter-task relationships are typically estimated based on training data for each task, which is inefficient in lifelong learning settings where the goal is to learn each consecutive task rapidly from as little data as possible. To reduce this burden, we develop a lifelong reinforcement learning method based on coupled dictionary learning that incorporates high-level task descriptors to model the intertask relationships. We show that using task descriptors improves the performance of the learned task policies, providing both theoretical justification for the benefit and empirical demonstration of the improvement across a variety of dynamical control problems. Given only the descriptor for a new task, the lifelong learner is also able to accurately predict the task policy through zero-shot learning using the coupled dictionary, eliminating the need to pause to gather training data before addressing the task. Genetic programming (GP) is a well-known evolutionary computation technique, which has been successfully used to solve various problems, such as optimization, image analysis, and classification. Transfer learning is a type of machine learning approach that can be used to solve complex tasks. Transfer learning has been introduced to GP to solve complex Boolean and symbolic regression problems with some promise. However, the use of transfer learning with GP has not been investigated to address complex image classification tasks with noise and rotations, where GP cannot achieve satisfactory performance, but GP with transfer learning may improve the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on transfer learning and GP to solve complex image classification problems by extracting and reusing blocks of knowledge information, which are automatically discovered from similar as well as different image classification tasks during the evolutionary process. The proposed approach is evaluated on three texture data sets and three office data sets of image classification benchmarks, and achieves better classification performance than the state-of-the-art image classification algorithm. Further analysis on the evolved solutions trees shows that the proposed approach with transfer learning can successfully discover and reuse knowledge information extracted from similar or different problems to improve its performance on complex image classification problems. Transfer learning aims at adapting a classifier trained on one domain with adequate labeled samples to a new domain where samples are from a different distribution and have no class labels. In this paper, we explore the transfer learning problems with multiple data sources and present a novel boosting algorithm, SharedBoost. This novel algorithm is capable of applying for very high dimensional data such as in text mining where the feature dimension is beyond several ten thousands. The experimental results illustrate that the SharedBoost algorithm significantly outperforms the traditional methods which transfer knowledge with supervised learning techniques. Besides, SharedBoost also provides much better classification accuracy and more stable performance than some other typical transfer learning methods such as the structural correspondence learning (SCL) and the structural learning in the multiple sources transfer learning problems. High-level semantic feature is important to recognize human action. Recently, relative attributes, which are used to describe relative relationship, have been proposed as one of high-level semantic features and have shown promising performance. However, the training process is very sensitive to noises and moreover it is not robust to zero-shot learning. In this paper, to overcome these drawbacks, we propose a robust learning framework using relative attributes for human action recognition. We simultaneously add Sigmoid and Gaussian envelops into the loss objective. In this way, the influence of outliers will be greatly reduced in the process of optimization, thus improving the accuracy. In addition, we adopt Gaussian Mixture models for better fitting the distribution of actions in rank score space. Correspondingly, a novel transfer strategy is proposed to evaluate the parameters of Gaussian Mixture models for unseen classes. Our method is verified on three challenging datasets (KTH, UIUC and HOLLYWOOD2), and the experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better results than previous methods in both zero-shot classification and traditional recognition task for human action recognition.