Considering the increasing concerns about data copyright and privacy issues, we present a novel Absolute Zero-Shot Learning (AZSL) paradigm, i.e., training a classifier with zero real data. The key innovation is to involve a teacher model as the data safeguard to guide the AZSL model training without data leaking. The AZSL model consists of a generator and student network, which can achieve date-free knowledge transfer while maintaining the performance of the teacher network. We investigate `black-box' and `white-box' scenarios in AZSL task as different levels of model security. Besides, we also provide discussion of teacher model in both inductive and transductive settings. Despite embarrassingly simple implementations and data-missing disadvantages, our AZSL framework can retain state-of-the-art ZSL and GZSL performance under the `white-box' scenario. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis also demonstrates promising results when deploying the model under `black-box' scenario.
@article{arxiv.2202.11319,
title = {Absolute Zero-Shot Learning},
author = {Rui Gao and Fan Wan and Daniel Organisciak and Jiyao Pu and Junyan Wang and Haoran Duan and Peng Zhang and Xingsong Hou and Yang Long},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.11319},
year = {2022}
}