Zero-Shot Recognition via Semantic Embeddings and Knowledge Graphs

• Published in: 2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition pp. 6857 - 6866
• Main Authors: Wang, Xiaolong, Ye, Yufei, Gupta, Abhinav
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2018
• Subjects: Animals; Pattern recognition; Semantics; Symmetric matrices; Task analysis; Training; Visualization
• ISSN: 1063-6919
• DOI: 10.1109/CVPR.2018.00717

We consider the problem of zero-shot recognition: learning a visual classifier for a category with zero training examples, just using the word embedding of the category and its relationship to other categories, which visual data are provided. The key to dealing with the unfamiliar or novel category is to transfer knowledge obtained from familiar classes to describe the unfamiliar class. In this paper, we build upon the recently introduced Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and propose an approach that uses both semantic embeddings and the categorical relationships to predict the classifiers. Given a learned knowledge graph (KG), our approach takes as input semantic embeddings for each node (representing visual category). After a series of graph convolutions, we predict the visual classifier for each category. During training, the visual classifiers for a few categories are given to learn the GCN parameters. At test time, these filters are used to predict the visual classifiers of unseen categories. We show that our approach is robust to noise in the KG. More importantly, our approach provides significant improvement in performance compared to the current state-of-the-art results (from 2 ~ 3% on some metrics to whopping 20% on a few).