Ordinal Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot learning predicts new class even if no training data is available for that class. The solution to conventional zero-shot learning usually depends on side information such as attribute or text corpora. But these side information is not easy to obtain or use. Fortunately in many classification tasks, the class labels are ordered, and therefore closely related to each other. This paper deals with zero-shot learning for ordinal classification. The key idea is using label relevance to expand supervision information from seen labels to unseen labels. The proposed method SIDL generates a supervision intensity distribution (SID) that contains each label’s supervision intensity, and then learns a mapping from instance to SID. Experiments on two typical ordinal classification problems, i.e., head pose estimation and age estimation, show that SIDL performs significantly better than the compared regression methods. Furthermore, SIDL appears much more robust against the increase of unseen labels than other compared baselines.