Rethinking attribute localization for zero-shot learning

Recent advancements in attribute localization have showcased its potential in discovering the intrinsic semantic knowledge for visual feature representations, thereby facilitating significant visual-semantic interactions essential for zero-shot learning (ZSL). However, the majority of existing attribute localization methods heavily rely on classification constraints, resulting in accurate localization of only a few attributes while neglecting the rest important attributes associated with other classes. This limitation hinders the discovery of the intrinsic semantic relationships between attributes and visual features across all classes. To address this problem, we propose a novel attribute localization refinement (ALR) module designed to enhance the model’s ability to accurately localize all attributes. Essentially, we enhance weak discriminant attributes by grouping them and introduce weighted attribute regression to standardize the mapping values of semantic attributes. This module can be flexibly combined with existing attribute localization methods. Our experiments show that when combined with the ALR module, the localization errors in existing methods are corrected, and state-of-the-art classification performance is achieved.