Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) aims to recognize objects from both seen and unseen classes, when only the labeled examples from seen classes are provided. Recent feature generation methods learn a generative model that can synthesize the missing visual features of unseen classes to mitigate the data-imbalance problem in GZSL. However, the original visual feature space is suboptimal for GZSL classification since it lacks discriminative information. To tackle this issue, we propose to integrate the generation model with the embedding model, yielding a hybrid GZSL framework. The hybrid GZSL approach maps both the real and the synthetic samples produced by the generation model into an embedding space, where we perform the final GZSL classification. Specifically, we propose a contrastive embedding (CE) for our hybrid GZSL framework. The proposed contrastive embedding can leverage not only the class-wise supervision but also the instance-wise supervision, where the latter is usually neglected by existing GZSL researches. We evaluate our proposed hybrid GZSL framework with contrastive embedding, named CE-GZSL, on five benchmark datasets. The results show that our CEGZSL method can outperform the state-of-the-arts by a significant margin on three datasets. Our codes are available on //github.com/Hanzy1996/CE-GZSL.
To date, most existing self-supervised learning methods are designed and optimized for image classification. These pre-trained models can be sub-optimal for dense prediction tasks due to the discrepancy between image-level prediction and pixel-level prediction. To fill this gap, we aim to design an effective, dense self-supervised learning method that directly works at the level of pixels (or local features) by taking into account the correspondence between local features. We present dense contrastive learning, which implements self-supervised learning by optimizing a pairwise contrastive (dis)similarity loss at the pixel level between two views of input images. Compared to the baseline method MoCo-v2, our method introduces negligible computation overhead (only <1% slower), but demonstrates consistently superior performance when transferring to downstream dense prediction tasks including object detection, semantic segmentation and instance segmentation; and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Specifically, over the strong MoCo-v2 baseline, our method achieves significant improvements of 2.0% AP on PASCAL VOC object detection, 1.1% AP on COCO object detection, 0.9% AP on COCO instance segmentation, 3.0% mIoU on PASCAL VOC semantic segmentation and 1.8% mIoU on Cityscapes semantic segmentation. Code is available at: //git.io/AdelaiDet
Deep supervised learning has achieved great success in the last decade. However, its deficiencies of dependence on manual labels and vulnerability to attacks have driven people to explore a better solution. As an alternative, self-supervised learning attracts many researchers for its soaring performance on representation learning in the last several years. Self-supervised representation learning leverages input data itself as supervision and benefits almost all types of downstream tasks. In this survey, we take a look into new self-supervised learning methods for representation in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph learning. We comprehensively review the existing empirical methods and summarize them into three main categories according to their objectives: generative, contrastive, and generative-contrastive (adversarial). We further investigate related theoretical analysis work to provide deeper thoughts on how self-supervised learning works. Finally, we briefly discuss open problems and future directions for self-supervised learning. An outline slide for the survey is provided.
Zero-shot Learning (ZSL), which aims to predict for those classes that have never appeared in the training data, has arisen hot research interests. The key of implementing ZSL is to leverage the prior knowledge of classes which builds the semantic relationship between classes and enables the transfer of the learned models (e.g., features) from training classes (i.e., seen classes) to unseen classes. However, the priors adopted by the existing methods are relatively limited with incomplete semantics. In this paper, we explore richer and more competitive prior knowledge to model the inter-class relationship for ZSL via ontology-based knowledge representation and semantic embedding. Meanwhile, to address the data imbalance between seen classes and unseen classes, we developed a generative ZSL framework with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Our main findings include: (i) an ontology-enhanced ZSL framework that can be applied to different domains, such as image classification (IMGC) and knowledge graph completion (KGC); (ii) a comprehensive evaluation with multiple zero-shot datasets from different domains, where our method often achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art models. In particular, on four representative ZSL baselines of IMGC, the ontology-based class semantics outperform the previous priors e.g., the word embeddings of classes by an average of 12.4 accuracy points in the standard ZSL across two example datasets (see Figure 4).
Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) aims to transfer the labels of a handful of labeled data to the remaining massive unlabeled data via a graph. As one of the most popular graph-based SSL approaches, the recently proposed Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have gained remarkable progress by combining the sound expressiveness of neural networks with graph structure. Nevertheless, the existing graph-based methods do not directly address the core problem of SSL, i.e., the shortage of supervision, and thus their performances are still very limited. To accommodate this issue, a novel GCN-based SSL algorithm is presented in this paper to enrich the supervision signals by utilizing both data similarities and graph structure. Firstly, by designing a semi-supervised contrastive loss, improved node representations can be generated via maximizing the agreement between different views of the same data or the data from the same class. Therefore, the rich unlabeled data and the scarce yet valuable labeled data can jointly provide abundant supervision information for learning discriminative node representations, which helps improve the subsequent classification result. Secondly, the underlying determinative relationship between the data features and input graph topology is extracted as supplementary supervision signals for SSL via using a graph generative loss related to the input features. Intensive experimental results on a variety of real-world datasets firmly verify the effectiveness of our algorithm compared with other state-of-the-art methods.
Recently, many unsupervised deep learning methods have been proposed to learn clustering with unlabelled data. By introducing data augmentation, most of the latest methods look into deep clustering from the perspective that the original image and its tansformation should share similar semantic clustering assignment. However, the representation features before softmax activation function could be quite different even the assignment probability is very similar since softmax is only sensitive to the maximum value. This may result in high intra-class diversities in the representation feature space, which will lead to unstable local optimal and thus harm the clustering performance. By investigating the internal relationship between mutual information and contrastive learning, we summarized a general framework that can turn any maximizing mutual information into minimizing contrastive loss. We apply it to both the semantic clustering assignment and representation feature and propose a novel method named Deep Robust Clustering by Contrastive Learning (DRC). Different to existing methods, DRC aims to increase inter-class diver-sities and decrease intra-class diversities simultaneously and achieve more robust clustering results. Extensive experiments on six widely-adopted deep clustering benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DRC in both stability and accuracy. e.g., attaining 71.6% mean accuracy on CIFAR-10, which is 7.1% higher than state-of-the-art results.
Learning to classify unseen class samples at test time is popularly referred to as zero-shot learning (ZSL). If test samples can be from training (seen) as well as unseen classes, it is a more challenging problem due to the existence of strong bias towards seen classes. This problem is generally known as \emph{generalized} zero-shot learning (GZSL). Thanks to the recent advances in generative models such as VAEs and GANs, sample synthesis based approaches have gained considerable attention for solving this problem. These approaches are able to handle the problem of class bias by synthesizing unseen class samples. However, these ZSL/GZSL models suffer due to the following key limitations: $(i)$ Their training stage learns a class-conditioned generator using only \emph{seen} class data and the training stage does not \emph{explicitly} learn to generate the unseen class samples; $(ii)$ They do not learn a generic optimal parameter which can easily generalize for both seen and unseen class generation; and $(iii)$ If we only have access to a very few samples per seen class, these models tend to perform poorly. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning based generative model that naturally handles these limitations. The proposed model is based on integrating model-agnostic meta learning with a Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) to handle $(i)$ and $(iii)$, and uses a novel task distribution to handle $(ii)$. Our proposed model yields significant improvements on standard ZSL as well as more challenging GZSL setting. In ZSL setting, our model yields 4.5\%, 6.0\%, 9.8\%, and 27.9\% relative improvements over the current state-of-the-art on CUB, AWA1, AWA2, and aPY datasets, respectively.
When labeled training data is scarce, a promising data augmentation approach is to generate visual features of unknown classes using their attributes. To learn the class conditional distribution of CNN features, these models rely on pairs of image features and class attributes. Hence, they can not make use of the abundance of unlabeled data samples. In this paper, we tackle any-shot learning problems i.e. zero-shot and few-shot, in a unified feature generating framework that operates in both inductive and transductive learning settings. We develop a conditional generative model that combines the strength of VAE and GANs and in addition, via an unconditional discriminator, learns the marginal feature distribution of unlabeled images. We empirically show that our model learns highly discriminative CNN features for five datasets, i.e. CUB, SUN, AWA and ImageNet, and establish a new state-of-the-art in any-shot learning, i.e. inductive and transductive (generalized) zero- and few-shot learning settings. We also demonstrate that our learned features are interpretable: we visualize them by inverting them back to the pixel space and we explain them by generating textual arguments of why they are associated with a certain label.
This paper studies the problem of generalized zero-shot learning which requires the model to train on image-label pairs from some seen classes and test on the task of classifying new images from both seen and unseen classes. Most previous models try to learn a fixed one-directional mapping between visual and semantic space, while some recently proposed generative methods try to generate image features for unseen classes so that the zero-shot learning problem becomes a traditional fully-supervised classification problem. In this paper, we propose a novel model that provides a unified framework for three different approaches: visual-> semantic mapping, semantic->visual mapping, and metric learning. Specifically, our proposed model consists of a feature generator that can generate various visual features given class embeddings as input, a regressor that maps each visual feature back to its corresponding class embedding, and a discriminator that learns to evaluate the closeness of an image feature and a class embedding. All three components are trained under the combination of cyclic consistency loss and dual adversarial loss. Experimental results show that our model not only preserves higher accuracy in classifying images from seen classes, but also performs better than existing state-of-the-art models in in classifying images from unseen classes.
The key issue of few-shot learning is learning to generalize. In this paper, we propose a large margin principle to improve the generalization capacity of metric based methods for few-shot learning. To realize it, we develop a unified framework to learn a more discriminative metric space by augmenting the softmax classification loss function with a large margin distance loss function for training. Extensive experiments on two state-of-the-art few-shot learning models, graph neural networks and prototypical networks, show that our method can improve the performance of existing models substantially with very little computational overhead, demonstrating the effectiveness of the large margin principle and the potential of our method.
Prevalent techniques in zero-shot learning do not generalize well to other related problem scenarios. Here, we present a unified approach for conventional zero-shot, generalized zero-shot and few-shot learning problems. Our approach is based on a novel Class Adapting Principal Directions (CAPD) concept that allows multiple embeddings of image features into a semantic space. Given an image, our method produces one principal direction for each seen class. Then, it learns how to combine these directions to obtain the principal direction for each unseen class such that the CAPD of the test image is aligned with the semantic embedding of the true class, and opposite to the other classes. This allows efficient and class-adaptive information transfer from seen to unseen classes. In addition, we propose an automatic process for selection of the most useful seen classes for each unseen class to achieve robustness in zero-shot learning. Our method can update the unseen CAPD taking the advantages of few unseen images to work in a few-shot learning scenario. Furthermore, our method can generalize the seen CAPDs by estimating seen-unseen diversity that significantly improves the performance of generalized zero-shot learning. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves superior performance in zero-shot, generalized zero-shot and few/one-shot learning problems.