Hybrid Discriminative Attribute-Object Embedding Network for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) recognizes new combinations by learning from known attribute-object pairs. However, the main challenge of this task lies in the complex interactions between attributes and object visual representations, which lead to significant differences in images. In addition, the long-tail label distribution in the real world makes the recognition task more complicated. To address these problems, we propose a novel method, named Hybrid Discriminative Attribute-Object Embedding (HDA-OE) network. To increase the variability of training data, HDA-OE introduces an attribute-driven data synthesis (ADDS) module. ADDS generates new samples with diverse attribute labels by combining multiple attributes of the same object. By expanding the attribute space in the dataset, the model is encouraged to learn and distinguish subtle differences between attributes. To further improve the discriminative ability of the model, HDA-OE introduces the subclass-driven discriminative embedding (SDDE) module, which enhances the subclass discriminative ability of the encoding by embedding subclass information in a fine-grained manner, helping to capture the complex dependencies between attributes and object visual features. The proposed model has been evaluated on three benchmark datasets, and the results verify its effectiveness and reliability.

Relation-Aware Meta-Learning for Zero-shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval

Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) relies on free-hand sketches to retrieve natural photos within the same class. However, its practical application is limited by its inability to retrieve classes absent from the training set. To address this limitation, the task has evolved into Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (ZS-SBIR), where model performance is evaluated on unseen categories. Traditional SBIR primarily focuses on narrowing the domain gap between photo and sketch modalities. However, in the zero-shot setting, the model not only needs to address this cross-modal discrepancy but also requires a strong generalization capability to transfer knowledge to unseen categories. To this end, we propose a novel framework for ZS-SBIR that employs a pair-based relation-aware quadruplet loss to bridge feature gaps. By incorporating two negative samples from different modalities, the approach prevents positive features from becoming disproportionately distant from one modality while remaining close to another, thus enhancing inter-class separability. We also propose a Relation-Aware Meta-Learning Network (RAMLN) to obtain the margin, a hyper-parameter of cross-modal quadruplet loss, to improve the generalization ability of the model. RAMLN leverages external memory to store feature information, which it utilizes to assign optimal margin values. Experimental results obtained on the extended Sketchy and TU-Berlin datasets show a sharp improvement over existing state-of-the-art methods in ZS-SBIR.