English

Zero-Shot Visual Recognition using Semantics-Preserving Adversarial Embedding Networks

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2018-04-03 v2

Abstract

We propose a novel framework called Semantics-Preserving Adversarial Embedding Network (SP-AEN) for zero-shot visual recognition (ZSL), where test images and their classes are both unseen during training. SP-AEN aims to tackle the inherent problem --- semantic loss --- in the prevailing family of embedding-based ZSL, where some semantics would be discarded during training if they are non-discriminative for training classes, but could become critical for recognizing test classes. Specifically, SP-AEN prevents the semantic loss by introducing an independent visual-to-semantic space embedder which disentangles the semantic space into two subspaces for the two arguably conflicting objectives: classification and reconstruction. Through adversarial learning of the two subspaces, SP-AEN can transfer the semantics from the reconstructive subspace to the discriminative one, accomplishing the improved zero-shot recognition of unseen classes. Comparing with prior works, SP-AEN can not only improve classification but also generate photo-realistic images, demonstrating the effectiveness of semantic preservation. On four popular benchmarks: CUB, AWA, SUN and aPY, SP-AEN considerably outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by an absolute performance difference of 12.2\%, 9.3\%, 4.0\%, and 3.6\% in terms of harmonic mean values

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.01928,
  title  = {Zero-Shot Visual Recognition using Semantics-Preserving Adversarial Embedding Networks},
  author = {Long Chen and Hanwang Zhang and Jun Xiao and Wei Liu and Shih-Fu Chang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.01928},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:08:04.031Z