Zero-Shot Learning via Category-Specific Visual-Semantic Mapping

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) aims to classify a test instance from an unseen category based on the training instances from seen categories, in which the gap between seen categories and unseen categories is generally bridged via visual-semantic mapping between the low-level visual feature space and the intermediate semantic space. However, the visual-semantic mapping learnt based on seen categories may not generalize well to unseen categories because the data distributions between seen categories and unseen categories are considerably different, which is known as the projection domain shift problem in ZSL. To address this domain shift issue, we propose a method named Adaptive Embedding ZSL (AEZSL) to learn an adaptive visual-semantic mapping for each unseen category based on the similarities between each unseen category and all the seen categories. Then, we further make two extensions based on our AEZSL method. Firstly, in order to utilize the unlabeled test instances from unseen categories, we extend our AEZSL to a semi-supervised approach named AEZSL with Label Refinement (AEZSL_LR), in which a progressive approach is developed to update the visual classifiers and refine the predicted test labels alternatively based on the similarities among test instances and among unseen categories. Secondly, to avoid learning visual-semantic mapping for each unseen category in the large-scale classification task, we extend our AEZSL to a deep adaptive embedding model named Deep AEZSL (DAEZSL) sharing the similar idea (i.e., visual-semantic mapping should be category-specific and related to the semantic space) with AEZSL, which only needs to be trained once, but can be applied to arbitrary number of unseen categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve the state-of-the-art results for image classification on four benchmark datasets.