# On the Transferability of Visual Features in Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12494 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12494/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09670/) (2020)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00600/) (2017)
- [Generalized Zero- and Few-Shot Learning via Aligned Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01784/) (2018)
- [Label-Embedding for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08677/) (2015)
- [A Review of Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08641/) (2020)
- [Learning a Deep Embedding Model for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05088/) (2016)
- [An Empirical Study and Analysis of Generalized Zero-Shot Learning for Object Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04253/) (2016)
- [Contrastive Embedding for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16173/) (2021)
- [FREE: Feature Refinement for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13807/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Visual Recognition using Semantics-Preserving Adversarial Embedding Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01928/) (2017)
- [Semantics Disentangling for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07978/) (2021)
- [Invertible Zero-Shot Recognition Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04873/) (2020)
- [A Unified approach for Conventional Zero-shot, Generalized Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08653/) (2017)
- [CNN Filter DB: An Empirical Investigation of Trained Convolutional Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15331/) (2022)
- [Towards Effective Deep Embedding for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10075/) (2018)
- [A Gating Model for Bias Calibration in Generalized Zero-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04195/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) aims to train a classifier that can generalize to unseen classes, using a set of attributes as auxiliary information, and the visual features extracted from a pre-trained convolutional neural network. While recent GZSL methods have explored various techniques to leverage the capacity of these features, there has been an extensive growth of representation learning techniques that remain under-explored. In this work, we investigate the utility of different GZSL methods when using different feature extractors, and examine how these models' pre-training objectives, datasets, and architecture design affect their feature representation ability. Our results indicate that 1) methods using generative components for GZSL provide more advantages when using recent feature extractors; 2) feature extractors pre-trained using self-supervised learning objectives and knowledge distillation provide better feature representations, increasing up to 15% performance when used with recent GZSL techniques; 3) specific feature extractors pre-trained with larger datasets do not necessarily boost the performance of GZSL methods. In addition, we investigate how GZSL methods fare against CLIP, a more recent multi-modal pre-trained model with strong zero-shot performance. We found that GZSL tasks still benefit from generative-based GZSL methods along with CLIP's internet-scale pre-training to achieve state-of-the-art performance in fine-grained datasets. We release a modular framework for analyzing representation learning issues in GZSL here: https://github.com/uvavision/TV-GZSL