Ridge Regression, Hubness, and Zero-Shot Learning

This paper discusses the effect of hubness in zero-shot learning, when ridge regression is used to find a mapping between the example space to the label space. Contrary to the existing approach, which attempts to find a mapping from the example space to the label space, we show that mapping labels into the example space is desirable to suppress the emergence of hubs in the subsequent nearest neighbor search step. Assuming a simple data model, we prove that the proposed approach indeed reduces hubness. This was verified empirically on the tasks of bilingual lexicon extraction and image labeling: hubness was reduced with both of these tasks and the accuracy was improved accordingly.Comment: To be presented at ECML/PKDD 201

Generalized Zero-Shot Learning via Synthesized Examples

We present a generative framework for generalized zero-shot learning where the training and test classes are not necessarily disjoint. Built upon a variational autoencoder based architecture, consisting of a probabilistic encoder and a probabilistic conditional decoder, our model can generate novel exemplars from seen/unseen classes, given their respective class attributes. These exemplars can subsequently be used to train any off-the-shelf classification model. One of the key aspects of our encoder-decoder architecture is a feedback-driven mechanism in which a discriminator (a multivariate regressor) learns to map the generated exemplars to the corresponding class attribute vectors, leading to an improved generator. Our model's ability to generate and leverage examples from unseen classes to train the classification model naturally helps to mitigate the bias towards predicting seen classes in generalized zero-shot learning settings. Through a comprehensive set of experiments, we show that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, on several benchmark datasets, for both standard as well as generalized zero-shot learning.Comment: Accepted in CVPR'1

HAL: Improved Text-Image Matching by Mitigating Visual Semantic Hubs

The hubness problem widely exists in high-dimensional embedding space and is a fundamental source of error for cross-modal matching tasks. In this work, we study the emergence of hubs in Visual Semantic Embeddings (VSE) with application to text-image matching. We analyze the pros and cons of two widely adopted optimization objectives for training VSE and propose a novel hubness-aware loss function (HAL) that addresses previous methods' defects. Unlike (Faghri et al.2018) which simply takes the hardest sample within a mini-batch, HAL takes all samples into account, using both local and global statistics to scale up the weights of "hubs". We experiment our method with various configurations of model architectures and datasets. The method exhibits exceptionally good robustness and brings consistent improvement on the task of text-image matching across all settings. Specifically, under the same model architectures as (Faghri et al. 2018) and (Lee at al. 2018), by switching only the learning objective, we report a maximum R@1improvement of 7.4% on MS-COCO and 8.3% on Flickr30k.Comment: AAAI-20 (to appear