# ProCC: Progressive Cross-primitive Compatibility for Open-World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12417 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12417/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00600/) (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)
- [Robust Learning Through Cross-Task Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04096/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Conditional Sequential Modulation for Efficient Global Image Retouching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10390/) (2020)
- [Disentangling Visual Embeddings for Attributes and Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08536/) (2022)
- [Siamese Contrastive Embedding Network for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14475/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Joint Semantic Segmentation and Depth Estimation Using Asymmetric Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04766/) (2018)
- [Learning Graph Embeddings for Open World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01017/) (2021)
- [Independent Prototype Propagation for Zero-Shot Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00305/) (2021)
- [Learning Multiple Dense Prediction Tasks from Partially Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14893/) (2021)
- [KG-SP: Knowledge Guided Simple Primitives for Open World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06784/) (2022)
- [Modulating Image Restoration with Continual Levels via Adaptive Feature Modification Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08118/) (2019)
- [Learning to Relate Depth and Semantics for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07830/) (2021)
- [A Novel Perspective to Zero-shot Learning: Towards an Alignment of Manifold Structures via Semantic Feature Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14795/) (2020)
- [Towards Unbiased Multi-label Zero-Shot Learning with Pyramid and Semantic Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03483/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Self-Introspective Decoding: Alleviating Hallucinations for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02032/) (2024)
- [Neuron: Learning Context-Aware Evolving Representations for Zero-Shot Skeleton Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11288/) (2024)
- [On the Element-Wise Representation and Reasoning in Zero-Shot Image Recognition: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04879/) (2024)
- [Dual Expert Distillation Network for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16348/) (2024)
- [A Conditional Probability Framework for Compositional Zero-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17377/) (2025)
- [Leveraging MLLM Embeddings and Attribute Smoothing for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12584/) (2024)
- [Compositional Zero-Shot Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11106/) (2025)
- [Semantically Guided Dynamic Visual Prototype Refinement for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07114/) (2025)
- [FedAPA: Server-side Gradient-Based Adaptive Personalized Aggregation for Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07456/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-World Compositional Zero-shot Learning (OW-CZSL) aims to recognize novel compositions of state and object primitives in images with no priors on the compositional space, which induces a tremendously large output space containing all possible state-object compositions. Existing works either learn the joint compositional state-object embedding or predict simple primitives with separate classifiers. However, the former heavily relies on external word embedding methods, and the latter ignores the interactions of interdependent primitives, respectively. In this paper, we revisit the primitive prediction approach and propose a novel method, termed Progressive Cross-primitive Compatibility (ProCC), to mimic the human learning process for OW-CZSL tasks. Specifically, the cross-primitive compatibility module explicitly learns to model the interactions of state and object features with the trainable memory units, which efficiently acquires cross-primitive visual attention to reason high-feasibility compositions, without the aid of external knowledge. Moreover, considering the partial-supervision setting (pCZSL) as well as the imbalance issue of multiple task prediction, we design a progressive training paradigm to enable the primitive classifiers to interact to obtain discriminative information in an easy-to-hard manner. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other representative methods on both OW-CZSL and pCZSL settings by large margins.
