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.
Domain shift is a widely studied problem in transfer learning @cite_26 , although it is usually induced by sampling bias @cite_28 @cite_10 or sensor change @cite_3 rather than the disjoint categories in ZSL. Importance weighting (IW) @cite_0 @cite_10 has been one of the main adaptation techniques to address this issue. The prior work in this area is designed for the standard domain transfer problem in a supervised learning setting @cite_20 , while we are the first to generalise it to the zero-shot learning scenario. The IW technique we generalise is related to another domain adaptation approach based on discovering a feature mapping to minimise the (MMD) @cite_34 @cite_18 between distributions. However MMD, is less appropriate for us due to focus on feature mapping rather than instance reweighing, and our expectation is that only subsets of auxiliary instances will be relevant to the target rather than the holistic auxiliary set.
@cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_28 @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_34 @cite_10 @cite_20
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Domain-invariant representations are key to addressing the domain shift problem where the training and test examples follow different distributions. Existing techniques that have attempted to match the distributions of the source and target domains typically compare these distributions in the original feature space. This space, however, may not be directly suitable for such a comparison, since some of the features may have been distorted by the domain shift, or may be domain specific. In this paper, we introduce a Domain Invariant Projection approach: An unsupervised domain adaptation method that overcomes this issue by extracting the information that is invariant across the source and target domains. More specifically, we learn a projection of the data to a low-dimensional latent space where the distance between the empirical distributions of the source and target examples is minimized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the task of visual object recognition and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a standard domain adaptation benchmark dataset. A major assumption in many machine learning and data mining algorithms is that the training and future data must be in the same feature space and have the same distribution. However, in many real-world applications, this assumption may not hold. For example, we sometimes have a classification task in one domain of interest, but we only have sufficient training data in another domain of interest, where the latter data may be in a different feature space or follow a different data distribution. In such cases, knowledge transfer, if done successfully, would greatly improve the performance of learning by avoiding much expensive data-labeling efforts. In recent years, transfer learning has emerged as a new learning framework to address this problem. This survey focuses on categorizing and reviewing the current progress on transfer learning for classification, regression, and clustering problems. In this survey, we discuss the relationship between transfer learning and other related machine learning techniques such as domain adaptation, multitask learning and sample selection bias, as well as covariate shift. We also explore some potential future issues in transfer learning research. Datasets are an integral part of contemporary object recognition research. They have been the chief reason for the considerable progress in the field, not just as source of large amounts of training data, but also as means of measuring and comparing performance of competing algorithms. At the same time, datasets have often been blamed for narrowing the focus of object recognition research, reducing it to a single benchmark performance number. Indeed, some datasets, that started out as data capture efforts aimed at representing the visual world, have become closed worlds unto themselves (e.g. the Corel world, the Caltech-101 world, the PASCAL VOC world). With the focus on beating the latest benchmark numbers on the latest dataset, have we perhaps lost sight of the original purpose? The goal of this paper is to take stock of the current state of recognition datasets. We present a comparison study using a set of popular datasets, evaluated based on a number of criteria including: relative data bias, cross-dataset generalization, effects of closed-world assumption, and sample value. The experimental results, some rather surprising, suggest directions that can improve dataset collection as well as algorithm evaluation protocols. But more broadly, the hope is to stimulate discussion in the community regarding this very important, but largely neglected issue. Domain adaptation is an important emerging topic in computer vision. In this paper, we present one of the first studies of domain shift in the context of object recognition. We introduce a method that adapts object models acquired in a particular visual domain to new imaging conditions by learning a transformation that minimizes the effect of domain-induced changes in the feature distribution. The transformation is learned in a supervised manner and can be applied to categories for which there are no labeled examples in the new domain. While we focus our evaluation on object recognition tasks, the transform-based adaptation technique we develop is general and could be applied to nonimage data. Another contribution is a new multi-domain object database, freely available for download. We experimentally demonstrate the ability of our method to improve recognition on categories with few or no target domain labels and moderate to large changes in the imaging conditions. A situation where training and test samples follow different input distributions is called covariate shift. Under covariate shift, standard learning methods such as maximum likelihood estimation are no longer consistent—weighted variants according to the ratio of test and training input densities are consistent. Therefore, accurately estimating the density ratio, called the importance, is one of the key issues in covariate shift adaptation. A naive approach to this task is to first estimate training and test input densities separately and then estimate the importance by taking the ratio of the estimated densities. However, this naive approach tends to perform poorly since density estimation is a hard task particularly in high dimensional cases. In this paper, we propose a direct importance estimation method that does not involve density estimation. Our method is equipped with a natural cross validation procedure and hence tuning parameters such as the kernel width can be objectively optimized. Simulations illustrate the usefulness of our approach. We propose two statistical tests to determine if two samples are from different distributions. Our test statistic is in both cases the distance between the means of the two samples mapped into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The first test is based on a large deviation bound for the test statistic, while the second is based on the asymptotic distribution of this statistic. The test statistic can be computed in O(m2) time. We apply our approach to a variety of problems, including attribute matching for databases using the Hungarian marriage method, where our test performs strongly. We also demonstrate excellent performance when comparing distributions over graphs, for which no alternative tests currently exist. We consider the scenario where training and test data are drawn from different distributions, commonly referred to as sample selection bias. Most algorithms for this setting try to first recover sampling distributions and then make appropriate corrections based on the distribution estimate. We present a nonparametric method which directly produces resampling weights without distribution estimation. Our method works by matching distributions between training and testing sets in feature space. Experimental results demonstrate that our method works well in practice. The goal of transfer learning is to improve the learning of a new target concept given knowledge of related source concept(s). We introduce the first boosting-based algorithms for transfer learning that apply to regression tasks. First, we describe two existing classification transfer algorithms, ExpBoost and TrAdaBoost, and show how they can be modified for regression. We then introduce extensions of these algorithms that improve performance significantly on controlled experiments in a wide range of test domains.