This work introduces a model that can recognize objects in images even if no training data is available for the objects. The only necessary knowledge about the unseen categories comes from unsupervised large text corpora. In our zero-shot framework distributional information in language can be seen as spanning a semantic basis for understanding what objects look like. Most previous zero-shot learning models can only differentiate between unseen classes. In contrast, our model can both obtain state of the art performance on classes that have thousands of training images and obtain reasonable performance on unseen classes. This is achieved by first using outlier detection in the semantic space and then two separate recognition models. Furthermore, our model does not require any manually defined semantic features for either words or images.
We propose to shift the goal of recognition from naming to describing. Doing so allows us not only to name familiar objects, but also: to report unusual aspects of a familiar object (“spotty dog”, not just “dog”); to say something about unfamiliar objects (“hairy and four-legged”, not just “unknown”); and to learn how to recognize new objects with few or no visual examples. Rather than focusing on identity assignment, we make inferring attributes the core problem of recognition. These attributes can be semantic (“spotty”) or discriminative (“dogs have it but sheep do not”). Learning attributes presents a major new challenge: generalization across object categories, not just across instances within a category. In this paper, we also introduce a novel feature selection method for learning attributes that generalize well across categories. We support our claims by thorough evaluation that provides insights into the limitations of the standard recognition paradigm of naming and demonstrates the new abilities provided by our attribute-based framework. In recent years, knowledge transfer algorithms have become one of most the active research areas in learning visual concepts. Most of the existing learning algorithms focuses on leveraging the knowledge transfer process which is specific to a given category. However, in many cases, such a process may not be very effective when a particular target category has very few samples. In such cases, it is interesting to examine, whether it is feasible to use cross-category knowledge for improving the learning process by exploring the knowledge in correlated categories. Such a task can be quite challenging due to variations in semantic similarities and differences between categories, which could either help or hinder the cross-category learning process. In order to address this challenge, we develop a cross-category label propagation algorithm, which can directly propagate the inter-category knowledge at instance level between the source and the target categories. Furthermore, this algorithm can automatically detect conditions under which the transfer process can be detrimental to the learning process. This provides us a way to know when the transfer of cross-category knowledge is both useful and desirable. We present experimental results on real image and video data sets in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. 