Improving Semantic Embedding Consistency by Metric Learning for Zero-Shot Classification

This paper addresses the task of zero-shot image classification. The key contribution of the proposed approach is to control the semantic embedding of images -- one of the main ingredients of zero-shot learning -- by formulating it as a metric learning problem. The optimized empirical criterion associates two types of sub-task constraints: metric discriminating capacity and accurate attribute prediction. This results in a novel expression of zero-shot learning not requiring the notion of class in the training phase: only pairs of image/attributes, augmented with a consistency indicator, are given as ground truth. At test time, the learned model can predict the consistency of a test image with a given set of attributes , allowing flexible ways to produce recognition inferences. Despite its simplicity, the proposed approach gives state-of-the-art results on four challenging datasets used for zero-shot recognition evaluation.Comment: in ECCV 2016, Oct 2016, amsterdam, Netherlands. 201

Multi-Target Prediction: A Unifying View on Problems and Methods

Multi-target prediction (MTP) is concerned with the simultaneous prediction of multiple target variables of diverse type. Due to its enormous application potential, it has developed into an active and rapidly expanding research field that combines several subfields of machine learning, including multivariate regression, multi-label classification, multi-task learning, dyadic prediction, zero-shot learning, network inference, and matrix completion. In this paper, we present a unifying view on MTP problems and methods. First, we formally discuss commonalities and differences between existing MTP problems. To this end, we introduce a general framework that covers the above subfields as special cases. As a second contribution, we provide a structured overview of MTP methods. This is accomplished by identifying a number of key properties, which distinguish such methods and determine their suitability for different types of problems. Finally, we also discuss a few challenges for future research

Few-shot classification in Named Entity Recognition Task

For many natural language processing (NLP) tasks the amount of annotated data is limited. This urges a need to apply semi-supervised learning techniques, such as transfer learning or meta-learning. In this work we tackle Named Entity Recognition (NER) task using Prototypical Network - a metric learning technique. It learns intermediate representations of words which cluster well into named entity classes. This property of the model allows classifying words with extremely limited number of training examples, and can potentially be used as a zero-shot learning method. By coupling this technique with transfer learning we achieve well-performing classifiers trained on only 20 instances of a target class.Comment: In proceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computin