We propose a novel approach for unsupervised zero-shot learning (ZSL) of
classes based on their names. Most existing unsupervised ZSL methods aim to
learn a model for directly comparing image features and class names. However,
this proves to be a difficult task due to dominance of non-visual semantics in
underlying vector-space embeddings of class names. To address this issue, we
discriminatively learn a word representation such that the similarities between
class and combination of attribute names fall in line with the visual
similarity. Contrary to the traditional zero-shot learning approaches that are
built upon attribute presence, our approach bypasses the laborious
attribute-class relation annotations for unseen classes. In addition, our
proposed approach renders text-only training possible, hence, the training can
be augmented without the need to collect additional image data. The
experimental results show that our method yields state-of-the-art results for
unsupervised ZSL in three benchmark datasets.Comment: To appear at IEEE Int. Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 201
