ZEST: Zero-shot learning from text descriptions using textual similarity and visual summarization

Tzuf Paz-Argaman, Yuval Atzmon, Gal Chechik, Reut Tsarfaty

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

We study the problem of recognizing visual entities from the textual descriptions of their classes. Specifically, given birds’ images with free-text descriptions of their species, we learn to classify images of previously-unseen species based on specie descriptions. This setup has been studied in the vision community under the name zero-shot learning from text, focusing on learning to transfer knowledge about visual aspects of birds from seen classes to previously-unseen ones. Here, we suggest focusing on the textual description and distilling from the description the most relevant information to effectively match visual features to the parts of the text that discuss them. Specifically, (1) we propose to leverage the similarity between species, reflected in the similarity between text descriptions of the species. (2) we derive visual summaries of the texts, i.e., extractive summaries that focus on the visual features that tend to be reflected in images. We propose a simple attention-based model augmented with the similarity and visual summaries components. Our empirical results consistently and significantly outperform the state-of-the-art on the largest benchmarks for text-based zero-shot learning, illustrating the critical importance of texts for zero-shot image-recognition.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Findings of ACL
Subtitle of host publicationEMNLP 2020
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages569-579
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781952148903
StatePublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes
EventFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020: EMNLP 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 16 Nov 202020 Nov 2020

Publication series

NameFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics Findings of ACL: EMNLP 2020

Conference

ConferenceFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2020: EMNLP 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period16/11/2020/11/20

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Association for Computational Linguistics

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