Predicting Visual Exemplars of Unseen Classes for Zero-Shot Learning

Soravit Changpinyo, Wei-Lun Chao, Fei Sha; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017, pp. 3476-3485

Leveraging class semantic descriptions and examples of known objects, zero-shot learning makes it possible to train a recognition model for an object class whose examples are not available. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot learning model that takes advantage of clustering structures in the semantic embedding space. The key idea is to impose the structural constraint that semantic representations must be predictive of the locations of their corresponding visual exemplars. To this end, this reduces to training multiple kernel-based regressors from semantic representation-exemplar pairs from labeled data of the seen object categories. Despite its simplicity, our approach significantly outperforms existing zero-shot learning methods in three out of four benchmark datasets, including the ImageNet dataset with more than 20,000 unseen categories.