Learning Discriminative Latent Attributes for Zero-Shot Classification

Huajie Jiang, Ruiping Wang, Shiguang Shan, Yi Yang, Xilin Chen; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017, pp. 4223-4232

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to transfer knowledge from observed classes to the unseen classes, based on the assumption that both the seen and unseen classes share a common semantic space, among which attributes enjoy a great popularity. However, few works study whether the human-designed semantic attributes are discriminative enough to recognize different classes. Moreover, attributes are often correlated with each other, which makes it less desirable to learn each attribute independently. In this paper, we propose to learn a latent attribute space, which is not only discriminative but also semantic-preserving, to perform the ZSL task. Specifically, a dictionary learning framework is exploited to connect the latent attribute space with attribute space and similarity space. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.