HFM: A Hybrid Feature Model Based on Conditional Auto Encoders for Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) is related to training machine learning models capable of classifying or predicting classes (labels) that are not involved in the training set (unseen classes). A well-known problem in Deep Learning (DL) is the requirement for large amount of training data. Zero-Shot learning is a straightforward approach that can be applied to overcome this problem. We propose a Hybrid Feature Model (HFM) based on conditional autoencoders for training a classical machine learning model on pseudo training data generated by two conditional autoencoders (given the semantic space as a condition): (a) the first autoencoder is trained with the visual space concatenated with the semantic space and (b) the second autoencoder is trained with the visual space as an input. Then, the decoders of both autoencoders are fed by the test data of the unseen classes to generate pseudo training data. To classify the unseen classes, the pseudo training data are combined to train a support vector machine. Tests on four different benchmark datasets show that the proposed method shows promising results compared to the current state-of-the-art when it comes to settings for both standard Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL).