Relation-based Generalized Zero-shot Classification with the Domain Discriminator on the shared representation

Masahiro Suzuki, Yutaka Matsuo

Abstract: Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) is the task of predicting a test image from seen or unseen classes using pre-defined class-attributes and images from the seen classes. Typical ZSL models assign the class corresponding to the most relevant attribute as the predicted label of the test image based on the learned relation between the attribute and the image. However, this relation-based approach presents a difficulty: many of the test images are predicted as biased to the seen domain, i.e., the \emph{domain bias problem}. Recently, many methods have addressed this difficulty using a synthesis-based approach that, however, requires generation of large amounts of high-quality unseen images after training and the additional training of classifier given them. Therefore, for this study, we aim at alleviating this difficulty in the manner of the relation-based approach. First, we consider the requirements for good performance in a ZSL setting and introduce a new model based on a variational autoencoder that learns to embed attributes and images into the shared representation space which satisfies those requirements. Next, we assume that the domain bias problem in GZSL derives from a situation in which embedding of the unseen domain overlaps that of the seen one. We introduce a discriminator that distinguishes domains in a shared space and learns jointly with the above embedding model to prevent this situation. After training, we can obtain prior knowledge from the discriminator of which domain is more likely to be embedded anywhere in the shared space. We propose combination of this knowledge and the relation-based classification on the embedded shared space as a mixture model to compensate class prediction. Experimentally obtained results confirm that the proposed method significantly improves the domain bias problem in relation-based settings and achieves almost equal accuracy to that of high-cost synthesis-based methods.