Semantic-visual shared knowledge graph for zero-shot learning

Almost all existing zero-shot learning methods work only on benchmark datasets (e.g., CUB, SUN, AwA, FLO and aPY) which have already provided pre-defined attributes for all the classes. These methods thus are hard to apply on real-world datasets (like ImageNet) since there are no such pre-defined attributes in the data environment. The latest works have explored to use semantic-rich knowledge graphs (such as WordNet) to substitute pre-defined attributes. However, these methods encounter a serious “role=“presentation”>domain shift” problem because such a knowledge graph cannot provide detailed enough semantics to describe fine-grained information. To this end, we propose a semantic-visual shared knowledge graph (SVKG) to enhance the detailed information for zero-shot learning. SVKG represents high-level information by using semantic embedding but describes fine-grained information by using visual features. These visual features can be directly extracted from real-world images to substitute pre-defined attributes. A multi-modals graph convolution network is also proposed to transfer SVKG into graph representations that can be used for downstream zero-shot learning tasks. Experimental results on the real-world datasets without pre-defined attributes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and show the benefits of the proposed. Our method obtains a +2.8%, +0.5%, and +0.2% increase compared with the state-of-the-art in 2-hops, 3-hops, and all divisions relatively.