# Entropy-Based Uncertainty Calibration for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03292 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03292/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00600/) (2017)
- [Deep metric learning using Triplet network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6622/) (2014)
- [Dynamic Few-Shot Visual Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09458/) (2018)
- [Generalized Zero- and Few-Shot Learning via Aligned Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01784/) (2018)
- [Learning Fine-grained Image Similarity with Deep Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.4661/) (2014)
- [Learning Deep Representations of Fine-grained Visual Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05395/) (2016)
- [Evaluation of Output Embeddings for Fine-Grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.8403/) (2014)
- [Label-Embedding for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08677/) (2015)
- [Learning a Deep Embedding Model for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05088/) (2016)
- [Open Set Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10427/) (2018)
- [An Empirical Study and Analysis of Generalized Zero-Shot Learning for Object Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04253/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Learning by Convex Combination of Semantic Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.5650/) (2013)
- [Semantic Autoencoder for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08345/) (2017)
- [Latent Embeddings for Zero-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08895/) (2016)
- [Generalized Zero-Shot Learning via Synthesized Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03878/) (2017)
- [Synthesized Classifiers for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00550/) (2016)
- [Deep Metric Learning with Hierarchical Triplet Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06951/) (2018)
- [A Generative Adversarial Approach for Zero-Shot Learning from Noisy Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01381/) (2017)
- [Leveraging the Invariant Side of Generative Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04092/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Learning via Semantic Similarity Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.04767/) (2015)
- [Generative Dual Adversarial Network for Generalized Zero-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04857/) (2018)
- [Progressive Graph Learning for Open-Set Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12087/) (2020)
- [Link the head to the "beak": Zero Shot Learning from Noisy Text Description at Part Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01148/) (2017)
- [Less is more: zero-shot learning from online textual documents with noise suppression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01146/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Mitigating Generation Shifts for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03163/) (2021)
- [Disentangling Semantic-to-visual Confusion for Zero-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08605/) (2021)
- [Unseen No More: Unlocking the Potential of CLIP for Generative Zero-shot HOI Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05974/) (2024)
- [Cluster-Aware Prompt Ensemble Learning for Few-Shot Vision-Language Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09867/) (2025)
- [SVIP: Semantically Contextualized Visual Patches for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10252/) (2025)
- [PSVMA+: Exploring Multi-granularity Semantic-visual Adaption for Generalized Zero-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11560/) (2024)
- [Distributed Zero-Shot Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08170/) (2025)
- [Fine-Grained Zero-Shot Learning with Attribute-Centric Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12219/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Compared to conventional zero-shot learning (ZSL) where recognising unseen classes is the primary or only aim, the goal of generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) is to recognise both seen and unseen classes. Most GZSL methods typically learn to synthesise visual representations from semantic information on the unseen classes. However, these types of models are prone to overfitting the seen classes, resulting in distribution overlap between the generated features of the seen and unseen classes. The overlapping region is filled with uncertainty as the model struggles to determine whether a test case from within the overlap is seen or unseen. Further, these generative methods suffer in scenarios with sparse training samples. The models struggle to learn the distribution of high dimensional visual features and, therefore, fail to capture the most discriminative inter-class features. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages dual variational autoencoders with a triplet loss to learn discriminative latent features and applies the entropy-based calibration to minimize the uncertainty in the overlapped area between the seen and unseen classes. Specifically, the dual generative model with the triplet loss synthesises inter-class discriminative latent features that can be mapped from either visual or semantic space. To calibrate the uncertainty for seen classes, we calculate the entropy over the softmax probability distribution from a general classifier. With this approach, recognising the seen samples within the seen classes is relatively straightforward, and there is less risk that a seen sample will be misclassified into an unseen class in the overlapped region. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.