# Make an Omelette with Breaking Eggs: Zero-Shot Learning for Novel Attribute Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.14182 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14182/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00600/) (2017)
- [Feature Generating Networks for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00981/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00817/) (2019)
- [Generalized Zero- and Few-Shot Learning via Aligned Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01784/) (2018)
- [Zero-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04340/) (2018)
- [Evaluation of Output Embeddings for Fine-Grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.8403/) (2014)
- [f-VAEGAN-D2: A Feature Generating Framework for Any-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10132/) (2019)
- [Attribute Prototype Network for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08290/) (2020)
- [Semantic Autoencoder for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08345/) (2017)
- [Task-Driven Modular Networks for Zero-Shot Compositional Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05908/) (2019)
- [Learning Graph Embeddings for Compositional Zero-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01987/) (2021)
- [Open World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12609/) (2021)
- [Symmetry and Group in Attribute-Object Compositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00587/) (2020)
- [A causal view of compositional zero-shot recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14610/) (2020)
- [Episode-based Prototype Generating Network for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03360/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Object Detection: Learning to Simultaneously Recognize and Localize Novel Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06049/) (2018)
- [Zero-Shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06601/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Object Detection by Hybrid Region Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06157/) (2018)
- [Attributes as Operators: Factorizing Unseen Attribute-Object Compositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09851/) (2018)
- [Probabilistic AND-OR Attribute Grouping for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02664/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most of the existing algorithms for zero-shot classification problems typically rely on the attribute-based semantic relations among categories to realize the classification of novel categories without observing any of their instances. However, training the zero-shot classification models still requires attribute labeling for each class (or even instance) in the training dataset, which is also expensive. To this end, in this paper, we bring up a new problem scenario: "Can we derive zero-shot learning for novel attribute detectors/classifiers and use them to automatically annotate the dataset for labeling efficiency?". Basically, given only a small set of detectors that are learned to recognize some manually annotated attributes (i.e., the seen attributes), we aim to synthesize the detectors of novel attributes in a zero-shot learning manner. Our proposed method, Zero-Shot Learning for Attributes (ZSLA), which is the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge, tackles this new research problem by applying the set operations to first decompose the seen attributes into their basic attributes and then recombine these basic attributes into the novel ones. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the capacity of our synthesized detectors for accurately capturing the semantics of the novel attributes and show their superior performance in terms of detection and localization compared to other baseline approaches. Moreover, we demonstrate the application of automatic annotation using our synthesized detectors on Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011 dataset. Various generalized zero-shot classification algorithms trained upon the dataset re-annotated by ZSLA show comparable performance with those trained with the manual ground-truth annotations. Please refer to our project page for source code: https://yuhsuanli.github.io/ZSLA/