Multi-domain feature-enhanced attribute updater for generalized zero-shot learning

The goal of generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) is to transfer knowledge from seen classes to unseen classes. However, a significant challenge is the single-category attributes are often inadequate to capture the intra-class variability of diverse image samples. During training, the model tends to cluster samples of seen categories based solely on semantic descriptions, overlooking subtle yet important visual differences. To address these challenges, this paper introduces an instance-level attribute updating method, termed as multi-domain feature-enhanced attribute updater (MDAU), which establishes a one-to-one alignment between visual and semantic by obtaining multiple instance-level attributes that closely correspond to the natural intra-class distribution of the image, in contrast to the many-to-one alignment typically used in traditional GZSL approaches. Specifically, we initially compute feature weights for each individual image, and then, the visual information is incorporated as conditions to facilitate the personalized updating of class attributes. We evaluate our model on three benchmark datasets, the results show that our model can achieve the state-of-the-art performance and detailed analysis also illustrates the effectiveness of each proposed module. Code is available at https://github.com/S-Silvia/MDAU. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2025.