An Integrated Attribute Guided Dense Attention Model for Fine-Grained Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Embedding learning (EL) and feature synthesizing (FS) are two of the popular categories of fine-grained GZSL methods. The global feature exploring EL or FS methods do not explore fine distinction as they ignore local details. And, the local detail exploring EL or FS methods either neglect direct attribute guidance or global information. Consequently, neither method performs well. In this paper, we propose to explore global and direct attribute-supervised local visual features for both EL and FS categories in an integrated manner for fine-grained GZSL. The proposed integrated network has an EL sub-network and a FS sub-network. Consequently, the proposed integrated network can be tested in two ways. We propose a novel two-step dense attention mechanism to discover attribute-guided local visual features. We introduce new mutual learning between the sub-networks to exploit mutually beneficial information for optimization. Moreover, to reduce bias towards the source domain during testing, we propose to compute source-target class similarity based on mutual information and transfer-learn the target classes. We demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms contemporary methods on benchmark datasets.