Learning Robust Visual-semantic Mapping for Zero-shot Learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims at recognizing unseen class examples (e.g., images) with knowledge transferred from seen classes. This is typically achieved by exploiting a semantic feature space shared by both seen and unseen classes, e.g., attributes or word vectors, as the bridge. In ZSL, the common practice is to train a mapping function between the visual and semantic feature spaces with labeled seen class examples. When inferring, given unseen class examples, the learned mapping function is reused to them and recognizes the class labels on some metrics among their semantic relations. However, the visual and semantic feature spaces are generally independent and exist in entirely different manifolds. Under such a paradigm, the ZSL models may easily suffer from the domain shift problem when constructing and reusing the mapping function, which becomes the major challenge in ZSL. In this thesis, we explore effective ways to mitigate the domain shift problem and learn a robust mapping function between the visual and semantic feature spaces. We focus on fully empowering the semantic feature space, which is one of the key building blocks of ZSL. In summary, this thesis targets fully empowering the semantic feature space and design effective solutions to mitigate the domain shift problem and hence obtain a more robust visual-semantic mapping function for ZSL. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.