A Joint Label Space for Generalized Zero-Shot Classification

The fundamental problem of Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) is that the one-hot label space is discrete, which leads to a complete loss of the relationships between seen and unseen classes. Conventional approaches rely on using semantic auxiliary information, e.g. attributes, to re-encode each class so as to preserve the inter-class associations. However, existing learning algorithms only focus on unifying visual and semantic spaces without jointly considering the label space. More importantly, because the final classification is conducted in the label space through a compatibility function, the gap between attribute and label spaces leads to significant performance degradation. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel pathway that uses the label space to jointly reconcile visual and semantic spaces directly, which is named Attributing Label Space (ALS). In the training phase, one-hot labels of seen classes are directly used as prototypes in a common space, where both images and attributes are mapped. Since mappings can be optimized independently, the computational complexity is extremely low. In addition, the correlation between semantic attributes has less influence on visual embedding training because features are mapped into labels instead of attributes. In the testing phase, the discrete condition of label space is removed, and priori one-hot labels are used to denote seen classes and further compose labels of unseen classes. Therefore, the label space is very discriminative for the Generalized ZSL (GZSL), which is more reasonable and challenging for real-world applications. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks manifest improved performance over all of compared state-of-the-art methods.