Write a Classifier: Zero-Shot Learning Using Purely Textual Descriptions

The main question we address in this paper is how to use purely textual description of categories with no training images to learn visual classifiers for these categories. We propose an approach for zero-shot learning of object categories where the description of unseen categories comes in the form of typical text such as an encyclopedia entry, without the need to explicitly defined attributes. We propose and investigate two baseline formulations, based on regression and domain adaptation. Then, we propose a new constrained optimization formulation that combines a regression function and a knowledge transfer function with additional constraints to predict the classifier parameters for new classes. We applied the proposed approach on two fine-grained categorization datasets, and the results indicate successful classifier prediction.