Towards Effective Deep Embedding for Zero-Shot Learning
This work addresses the model bias problem in zero-shot learning, which is crucial for AI systems to generalize to unseen classes, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing embedding-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of constructing an effective embedding space for zero-shot learning by proposing a two-branch network that enforces intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, and extends it to a transductive setting with pseudo labeling, achieving superior performance on five standard datasets.
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) can be formulated as a cross-domain matching problem: after being projected into a joint embedding space, a visual sample will match against all candidate class-level semantic descriptions and be assigned to the nearest class. In this process, the embedding space underpins the success of such matching and is crucial for ZSL. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth study on the construction of embedding space for ZSL and posit that an ideal embedding space should satisfy two criteria: intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. While the former encourages the embeddings of visual samples of one class to distribute tightly close to the semantic description embedding of this class, the latter requires embeddings from different classes to be well separated from each other. Towards this goal, we present a simple but effective two-branch network to simultaneously map semantic descriptions and visual samples into a joint space, on which visual embeddings are forced to regress to their class-level semantic embeddings and the embeddings crossing classes are required to be distinguishable by a trainable classifier. Furthermore, we extend our method to a transductive setting to better handle the model bias problem in ZSL (i.e., samples from unseen classes tend to be categorized into seen classes) with minimal extra supervision. Specifically, we propose a pseudo labeling strategy to progressively incorporate the testing samples into the training process and thus balance the model between seen and unseen classes. Experimental results on five standard ZSL datasets show the superior performance of the proposed method and its transductive extension.