Due to the importance of zero-shot learning, i.e. classifying images where there is a lack of labeled training data, the number of proposed approaches has recently increased steadily. We argue that it is time to take a step back and to analyze the status quo of the area. The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, given the fact that there is no agreed upon zero-shot learning benchmark, we first define a new benchmark by unifying both the evaluation protocols and data splits of publicly available datasets used for this task. This is an important contribution as published results are often not comparable and sometimes even flawed due to, e.g. pre-training on zero-shot test classes. Moreover, we propose a new zero-shot learning dataset, the Animals with Attributes 2 (AWA2) dataset which we make publicly available both in terms of image features and the images themselves. Second, we compare and analyze a significant number of the state-of-the-art methods in depth, both in the classic zero-shot setting but also in the more realistic generalized zero-shot setting. Finally, we discuss in detail the limitations of the current status of the area which can be taken as a basis for advancing it.

Image classification has advanced significantly in recent years with the availability of large-scale image sets. However, fine-grained classification remains a major challenge due to the annotation cost of large numbers of finegrained categories. This project shows that compelling classification performance can be achieved on such categories even without labeled training data. Given image and class embeddings, we learn a compatibility function such that matching embeddings are assigned a higher score than mismatching ones; zero-shot classification of an image proceeds by finding the label yielding the highest joint compatibility score. We use state-of-the-art image features and focus on different supervised attributes and unsupervised output embeddings either derived from hierarchies or learned from unlabeled text corpora. We establish a substantially improved state-of-the-art on the Animals with Attributes and Caltech-UCSD Birds datasets. Most encouragingly, we demonstrate that purely unsupervised output embeddings (learned from Wikipedia and improved with finegrained text) achieve compelling results, even outperforming the previous supervised state-of-the-art. By combining different output embeddings, we further improve results.

Suffering from the extreme training data imbalance between seen and unseen classes, most of existing state-of-theart approaches fail to achieve satisfactory results for the challenging generalized zero-shot learning task. To circumvent the need for labeled examples of unseen classes, we propose a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) that synthesizes CNN features conditioned on class-level semantic information, offering a shortcut directly from a semantic descriptor of a class to a class-conditional feature distribution. Our proposed approach, pairing a Wasserstein GAN with a classification loss, is able to generate sufficiently discriminative CNN features to train softmax classifiers or any multimodal embedding method. Our experimental results demonstrate a significant boost in accuracy over the state of the art on five challenging datasets -CUB, FLO, SUN, AWA and ImageNet -in both the zero-shot learning and generalized zero-shot learning settings.

Attributes act as intermediate representations that enable parameter sharing between classes, a must when training data is scarce. We propose to view attribute-based image classification as a label-embedding problem: each class is embedded in the space of attribute vectors. We introduce a function that measures the compatibility between an image and a label embedding. The parameters of this function are learned on a training set of labeled samples to ensure that, given an image, the correct classes rank higher than the incorrect ones. Results on the Animals With Attributes and Caltech-UCSD-Birds datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms the standard Direct Attribute Prediction baseline in a zero-shot learning scenario. Label embedding enjoys a built-in ability to leverage alternative sources of information instead of or in addition to attributes, such as, e.g., class hierarchies or textual descriptions. Moreover, label embedding encompasses the whole range of learning settings from zero-shot learning to regular learning with a large number of labeled examples.

Due to the importance of zero-shot learning, the number of proposed approaches has increased steadily recently. We argue that it is time to take a step back and to analyze the status quo of the area. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, given the fact that there is no agreed upon zeroshot learning benchmark, we first define a new benchmark by unifying both the evaluation protocols and data splits. This is an important contribution as published results are often not comparable and sometimes even flawed due to, e.g. pre-training on zero-shot test classes. Second, we compare and analyze a significant number of the state-of-theart methods in depth, both in the classic zero-shot setting but also in the more realistic generalized zero-shot setting. Finally, we discuss limitations of the current status of the area which can be taken as a basis for advancing it.

Attributes are an intermediate representation, which enables parameter sharing between classes, a must when training data is scarce. We propose to view attribute-based image classification as a label-embedding problem: each class is embedded in the space of attribute vectors. We introduce a function which measures the compatibility between an image and a label embedding. The parameters of this function are learned on a training set of labeled samples to ensure that, given an image, the correct classes rank higher than the incorrect ones. Results on the Animals With Attributes and Caltech-UCSD-Birds datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms the standard Direct Attribute Prediction baseline in a zero-shot learning scenario. The label embedding framework offers other advantages such as the ability to leverage alternative sources of information in addition to attributes (e.g. class hierarchies) or to transition smoothly from zero-shot learning to learning with large quantities of data.

State-of-the-art methods for zero-shot visual recognition formulate learning as a joint embedding problem of images and side information. In these formulations the current best complement to visual features are attributes: manuallyencoded vectors describing shared characteristics among categories. Despite good performance, attributes have limitations: (1) finer-grained recognition requires commensurately more attributes, and (2) attributes do not provide a natural language interface. We propose to overcome these limitations by training neural language models from scratch; i.e. without pre-training and only consuming words and characters. Our proposed models train end-to-end to align with the fine-grained and category-specific content of images. Natural language provides a flexible and compact way of encoding only the salient visual aspects for distinguishing categories. By training on raw text, our model can do inference on raw text as well, providing humans a familiar mode both for annotation and retrieval. Our model achieves strong performance on zero-shot text-based image retrieval and significantly outperforms the attribute-based state-of-the-art for zero-shot classification on the Caltech-UCSD Birds 200-2011 dataset.

We present a novel latent embedding model for learning a compatibility function between image and class embeddings, in the context of zero-shot classification. The proposed method augments the state-of-the-art bilinear compatibility model by incorporating latent variables. Instead of learning a single bilinear map, it learns a collection of maps with the selection, of which map to use, being a latent variable for the current image-class pair. We train the model with a ranking based objective function which penalizes incorrect rankings of the true class for a given image. We empirically demonstrate that our model improves the state-of-the-art for various class embeddings consistently on three challenging publicly available datasets for the zero-shot setting. Moreover, our method leads to visually highly interpretable results with clear clusters of different fine-grained object properties that correspond to different latent variable maps.