Zero-shot action recognition is the task of recognizingaction classes without visual examples, only with a seman-tic embedding which relates unseen to seen classes. Theproblem can be seen as learning a function which general-izes well to instances of unseen classes without losing dis-crimination between classes. Neural networks can modelthe complex boundaries between visual classes, which ex-plains their success as supervised models. However, inzero-shot learning, these highly specialized class bound-aries may not transfer well from seen to unseen classes.In this paper we propose a centroid-based representation,which clusters visual and semantic representation, consid-ers all training samples at once, and in this way generaliz-ing well to instances from unseen classes. We optimize theclustering using Reinforcement Learning which we show iscritical for our approach to work. We call the proposedmethod CLASTER and observe that it consistently outper-forms the state-of-the-art in all standard datasets, includ-ing UCF101, HMDB51 and Olympic Sports; both in thestandard zero-shot evaluation and the generalized zero-shotlearning. Further, we show that our model performs com-petitively in the image domain as well, outperforming thestate-of-the-art in many settings.
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).
The purpose of few-shot recognition is to recognize novel categories with a limited number of labeled examples in each class. To encourage learning from a supplementary view, recent approaches have introduced auxiliary semantic modalities into effective metric-learning frameworks that aim to learn a feature similarity between training samples (support set) and test samples (query set). However, these approaches only augment the representations of samples with available semantics while ignoring the query set, which loses the potential for the improvement and may lead to a shift between the modalities combination and the pure-visual representation. In this paper, we devise an attributes-guided attention module (AGAM) to utilize human-annotated attributes and learn more discriminative features. This plug-and-play module enables visual contents and corresponding attributes to collectively focus on important channels and regions for the support set. And the feature selection is also achieved for query set with only visual information while the attributes are not available. Therefore, representations from both sets are improved in a fine-grained manner. Moreover, an attention alignment mechanism is proposed to distill knowledge from the guidance of attributes to the pure-visual branch for samples without attributes. Extensive experiments and analysis show that our proposed module can significantly improve simple metric-based approaches to achieve state-of-the-art performance on different datasets and settings.
Visual and audio modalities are highly correlated, yet they contain different information. Their strong correlation makes it possible to predict the semantics of one from the other with good accuracy. Their intrinsic differences make cross-modal prediction a potentially more rewarding pretext task for self-supervised learning of video and audio representations compared to within-modality learning. Based on this intuition, we propose Cross-Modal Deep Clustering (XDC), a novel self-supervised method that leverages unsupervised clustering in one modality (e.g., audio) as a supervisory signal for the other modality (e.g., video). This cross-modal supervision helps XDC utilize the semantic correlation and the differences between the two modalities. Our experiments show that XDC outperforms single-modality clustering and other multi-modal variants. XDC achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among self-supervised methods on multiple video and audio benchmarks. Most importantly, our video model pretrained on large-scale unlabeled data significantly outperforms the same model pretrained with full-supervision on ImageNet and Kinetics for action recognition on HMDB51 and UCF101. To the best of our knowledge, XDC is the first self-supervised learning method that outperforms large-scale fully-supervised pretraining for action recognition on the same architecture.
We consider the question: how can you sample good negative examples for contrastive learning? We argue that, as with metric learning, learning contrastive representations benefits from hard negative samples (i.e., points that are difficult to distinguish from an anchor point). The key challenge toward using hard negatives is that contrastive methods must remain unsupervised, making it infeasible to adopt existing negative sampling strategies that use label information. In response, we develop a new class of unsupervised methods for selecting hard negative samples where the user can control the amount of hardness. A limiting case of this sampling results in a representation that tightly clusters each class, and pushes different classes as far apart as possible. The proposed method improves downstream performance across multiple modalities, requires only few additional lines of code to implement, and introduces no computational overhead.
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.
In information retrieval (IR) and related tasks, term weighting approaches typically consider the frequency of the term in the document and in the collection in order to compute a score reflecting the importance of the term for the document. In tasks characterized by the presence of training data (such as text classification) it seems logical that the term weighting function should take into account the distribution (as estimated from training data) of the term across the classes of interest. Although `supervised term weighting' approaches that use this intuition have been described before, they have failed to show consistent improvements. In this article we analyse the possible reasons for this failure, and call consolidated assumptions into question. Following this criticism we propose a novel supervised term weighting approach that, instead of relying on any predefined formula, learns a term weighting function optimised on the training set of interest; we dub this approach \emph{Learning to Weight} (LTW). The experiments that we run on several well-known benchmarks, and using different learning methods, show that our method outperforms previous term weighting approaches in text classification.
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.
A major goal of unsupervised learning is to discover data representations that are useful for subsequent tasks, without access to supervised labels during training. Typically, this goal is approached by minimizing a surrogate objective, such as the negative log likelihood of a generative model, with the hope that representations useful for subsequent tasks will arise incidentally. In this work, we propose instead to directly target a later desired task by meta-learning an unsupervised learning rule, which leads to representations useful for that task. Here, our desired task (meta-objective) is the performance of the representation on semi-supervised classification, and we meta-learn an algorithm -- an unsupervised weight update rule -- that produces representations that perform well under this meta-objective. Additionally, we constrain our unsupervised update rule to a be a biologically-motivated, neuron-local function, which enables it to generalize to novel neural network architectures. We show that the meta-learned update rule produces useful features and sometimes outperforms existing unsupervised learning techniques. We further show that the meta-learned unsupervised update rule generalizes to train networks with different widths, depths, and nonlinearities. It also generalizes to train on data with randomly permuted input dimensions and even generalizes from image datasets to a text task.
We consider the problem of zero-shot recognition: learning a visual classifier for a category with zero training examples, just using the word embedding of the category and its relationship to other categories, which visual data are provided. The key to dealing with the unfamiliar or novel category is to transfer knowledge obtained from familiar classes to describe the unfamiliar class. In this paper, we build upon the recently introduced Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and propose an approach that uses both semantic embeddings and the categorical relationships to predict the classifiers. Given a learned knowledge graph (KG), our approach takes as input semantic embeddings for each node (representing visual category). After a series of graph convolutions, we predict the visual classifier for each category. During training, the visual classifiers for a few categories are given to learn the GCN parameters. At test time, these filters are used to predict the visual classifiers of unseen categories. We show that our approach is robust to noise in the KG. More importantly, our approach provides significant improvement in performance compared to the current state-of-the-art results (from 2 ~ 3% on some metrics to whopping 20% on a few).
Zero-shot Learners are models capable of predicting unseen classes. In this work, we propose a Zero-shot Learning approach for text categorization. Our method involves training model on a large corpus of sentences to learn the relationship between a sentence and embedding of sentence's tags. Learning such relationship makes the model generalize to unseen sentences, tags, and even new datasets provided they can be put into same embedding space. The model learns to predict whether a given sentence is related to a tag or not; unlike other classifiers that learn to classify the sentence as one of the possible classes. We propose three different neural networks for the task and report their accuracy on the test set of the dataset used for training them as well as two other standard datasets for which no retraining was done. We show that our models generalize well across new unseen classes in both cases. Although the models do not achieve the accuracy level of the state of the art supervised models, yet it evidently is a step forward towards general intelligence in natural language processing.