HardBoost: Boosting Zero-Shot Learning with Hard Classes

This work is a systematical analysis on the so-called hard class problem in zero-shot learning (ZSL), that is, some unseen classes disproportionally affect the ZSL performances than others, as well as how to remedy the problem by detecting and exploiting hard classes. At first, we report our empirical finding that the hard class problem is a ubiquitous phenomenon and persists regardless of used specific methods in ZSL. Then, we find that high semantic affinity among unseen classes is a plausible underlying cause of hardness and design two metrics to detect hard classes. Finally, two frameworks are proposed to remedy the problem by detecting and exploiting hard classes, one under inductive setting, the other under transductive setting. The proposed frameworks could accommodate most existing ZSL methods to further significantly boost their performances with little efforts. Extensive experiments on three popular benchmarks demonstrate the benefits by identifying and exploiting the hard classes in ZSL.