A Simple yet Effective Model for Zero-Shot Learning

Abstract

Zero-shot learning has tremendous application value in complex computer vision tasks, e.g. image classification, localization, image captioning, etc., for its capability of transferring knowledge from seen data to unseen data. Many recent proposed methods have shown that the formulation of a compatibility function and its generalization are crucial for the success of a zero-shot learning model. In this paper, we formulate a softmax-based compatibility function, and more importantly, propose a regularized empirical risk minimization objective to optimize the function parameter which leads to a better model generalization. In comparison to eight baseline models on four benchmark datasets, our model achieved the highest average ranking. Our model was effective even when the training set size was small and significantly outperforming an alternative state-of-the-art model in generalized zero-shot recognition tasks.