Cross-modal distribution alignment embedding network for generalized zero-shot learning

Many approaches in generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) rely on cross-modal mapping between the image feature space and the class embedding space, which achieves knowledge transfer from seen to unseen classes. However, these two spaces are completely different space and their manifolds are inconsistent, the existing methods suffer from highly overlapped semantic description of different classes, as in GZSL tasks unseen classes can be easily misclassified into seen classes. To handle these problems, we adopt a novel semantic embedding network which helps to encode more discriminative information from initial semantic attributes to semantic embeddings in visual space. Meanwhile, a distribution alignment constraint is adopted to help keep the distribution of the learned semantic embeddings consistent with the distribution of real image features. Moreover, an auxiliary classifier is adopted to strengthen the quality of the learned semantic embeddings. Finally, a relation network is used to classify the unseen images by computing the relation scores between the semantic embeddings and image features, which is much more flexible than the fixed distance metric functions. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is superior to other state-of-the-arts. (C)& nbsp;2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.