Marginalized Latent Semantic Encoder for Zero-Shot Learning

Abstract

Zero-shot learning has been well explored to precisely identify new unobserved classes through a visual-semantic function obtained from the existing objects. However, there exist two challenging obstacles: one is that the human-annotated semantics are insufficient to fully describe the visual samples; the other is the domain shift across existing and new classes. In this paper, we attempt to exploit the intrinsic relationship in the semantic manifold when given semantics are not enough to describe the visual objects, and enhance the generalization ability of the visual-semantic function with marginalized strategy. Specifically, we design a Marginalized Latent Semantic Encoder (MLSE), which is learned on the augmented seen visual features and the latent semantic representation. Meanwhile, latent semantics are discovered under an adaptive graph reconstruction scheme based on the provided semantics. Consequently, our proposed algorithm could enrich visual characteristics from seen classes, and well generalize to unobserved classes. Experimental results on zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed model delivers superior performance over the state-of-the-art zero-shot learning approaches.