Spherical Zero-Shot Learning

Jiayi Shen, Zehao Xiao, Xiantong Zhen, Lei Zhang

Abstract: Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) is a highly non-trivial task to generalize from seen to unseen classes. In this paper, we propose spherical zero-shot learning (SZSL) to address the major challenges in ZSL. By decoupling the similarity metric in the spherical embedding space into radius and angle, our SZSL can map classes to hyperspherical surfaces of different radiuses, which greatly increases its flexibility. Specifically, we introduce the spherical alignment on angles to spread classes as uniformly as possible to alleviate the hubness problem and simultaneously preserve the inter-class semantic structure to make the alignment more reasonable. We also introduce the spherical calibration with a minimum entropy based regularizer by adopting a larger radius for unseen classes than seen classes to reduce the prediction bias. Extensive experiments on five middle-scale benchmarks and large-scale ImageNet dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves superior performance for the traditional and generalized settings of ZSL.