SEER-ZSL: Semantic Encoder-Enhanced Representations for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) recognizes unseen classes by transferring knowledge from the seen classes, depending on the inherent interactions between visual and semantic data. However, the discrepancy between well-prepared training data and unpredictable real-world test scenarios remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces a dual strategy to address the generalization gap. Firstly, we incorporate semantic information through an innovative encoder. This encoder effectively integrates class-specific semantic information by targeting the performance disparity, enhancing the produced features to enrich the semantic space for class-specific attributes. Secondly, we refine our generative capabilities using a novel compositional loss function. This approach generates discriminative classes, effectively classifying both seen and unseen classes. In addition, we extend the exploitation of the learned latent space by utilizing controlled semantic inputs, ensuring the robustness of the model in varying environments. This approach yields a model that outperforms the state-of-the-art models in terms of both generalization and diverse settings, notably without requiring hyperparameter tuning or domain-specific adaptations. We also propose a set of novel evaluation metrics to provide a more detailed assessment of the reliability and reproducibility of the results. The complete code is made available on https://github.com/william-heyden/SEER-ZeroShotLearning/.

Bridging Logic and Learning: A Neural-Symbolic Approach for Enhanced Reasoning in Neural Models (ASPER)

Neural-symbolic learning, an intersection of neural networks and symbolic reasoning, aims to blend neural networks' learning capabilities with symbolic AI's interpretability and reasoning. This paper introduces an approach designed to improve the performance of neural models in learning reasoning tasks. It achieves this by integrating Answer Set Programming (ASP) solvers and domain-specific expertise, which is an approach that diverges from traditional complex neural-symbolic models. In this paper, a shallow artificial neural network (ANN) is specifically trained to solve Sudoku puzzles with minimal training data. The model has a unique loss function that integrates losses calculated using the ASP solver outputs, effectively enhancing its training efficiency. Most notably, the model shows a significant improvement in solving Sudoku puzzles using only 12 puzzles for training and testing without hyperparameter tuning. This advancement indicates that the model's enhanced reasoning capabilities have practical applications, extending well beyond Sudoku puzzles to potentially include a variety of other domains. The code can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/Fadi2200/ASPEN.

A Comprehensive Review of Automated Data Annotation Techniques in Human Activity Recognition

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has become one of the leading research topics of the last decade. As sensing technologies have matured and their economic costs have declined, a host of novel applications, e.g., in healthcare, industry, sports, and daily life activities have become popular. The design of HAR systems requires different time-consuming processing steps, such as data collection, annotation, and model training and optimization. In particular, data annotation represents the most labor-intensive and cumbersome step in HAR, since it requires extensive and detailed manual work from human annotators. Therefore, different methodologies concerning the automation of the annotation procedure in HAR have been proposed. The annotation problem occurs in different notions and scenarios, which all require individual solutions. In this paper, we provide the first systematic review on data annotation techniques for HAR. By grouping existing approaches into classes and providing a taxonomy, our goal is to support the decision on which techniques can be beneficially used in a given scenario.

An Integral Projection-based Semantic Autoencoder for Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) classification categorizes or predicts classes (labels) that are not included in the training set (unseen classes). Recent works proposed different semantic autoencoder (SAE) models where the encoder embeds a visual feature vector space into the semantic space and the decoder reconstructs the original visual feature space. The objective is to learn the embedding by leveraging a source data distribution, which can be applied effectively to a different but related target data distribution. Such embedding-based methods are prone to domain shift problems and are vulnerable to biases. We propose an integral projection-based semantic autoencoder (IP-SAE) where an encoder projects a visual feature space concatenated with the semantic space into a latent representation space. We force the decoder to reconstruct the visual-semantic data space. Due to this constraint, the visual-semantic projection function preserves the discriminatory data included inside the original visual feature space. The enriched projection forces a more precise reconstitution of the visual feature space invariant to the domain manifold. Consequently, the learned projection function is less domain-specific and alleviates the domain shift problem. Our proposed IP-SAE model consolidates a symmetric transformation function for embedding and projection, and thus, it provides transparency for interpreting generative applications in ZSL. Therefore, in addition to outperforming state-of-the-art methods considering four benchmark datasets, our analytical approach allows us to investigate distinct characteristics of generative-based methods in the unique context of zero-shot inference.