Zero-Shot Learning Using Stacked Autoencoder with Manifold Regularizations

Jianqiang Song, Guangming Shi, Xuemei Xie, Dahua Gao

Abstract: Zero-shot learning (ZSL), which focuses on transferring the knowledge from the seen classes to unseen ones, has attracted more and more attention in the computer vision community. Exploring the relationships among the spaces of visual representation, semantic description and label information is a key to the success of ZSL. In this paper, we propose a novel approach by using a two-layer Stacked AutoEncoder (StAE) with manifold regularizations to construct the tight relations of different spaces, where the first-layer encoder aims to project a visual feature vector into the semantic space, and the second-layer encoder connects the semantic description of a sample with its label directly. Meanwhile, the decoders seek to reconstruct the visual representation from label information and semantic description successively. Besides, two manifold regularizers are integrated in the stacked autoencoder, which captures the manifold structures residing in the different spaces effectively. Compared with the previous related works, the proposed approach is a more general framework and has stronger transfer ability from seen classes to unseen classes. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets clearly demonstrate that our StAE performs significantly better than the state-of-the-arts.