Beyond Attributes: Adversarial Erasing Embedding Network for Zero-shot Learning

In this paper, an adversarial erasing embedding network with the guidance of high-order attributes (AEEN-HOA) is proposed for going further to solve the challenging ZSL/GZSL task. AEEN-HOA consists of two branches, i.e., the upper stream is capable of erasing some initially discovered regions, then the high-order attribute supervision is incorporated to characterize the relationship between the class attributes. Meanwhile, the bottom stream is trained by taking the current background regions to train the same attribute. As far as we know, it is the first time of introducing the erasing operations into the ZSL task. In addition, we first propose a class attribute activation map for the visualization of ZSL output, which shows the relationship between class attribute feature and attention map. Experiments on four standard benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of AEEN-HOA framework.