Disentangling Visual Embeddings for Attributes and Objects

We study the problem of compositional zero-shot learning for object-attribute recognition. Prior works use visual features extracted with a backbone network, pre-trained for object classification and thus do not capture the subtly distinct features associated with attributes. To overcome this challenge, these studies employ supervision from the linguistic space, and use pre-trained word embeddings to better separate and compose attribute-object pairs for recognition. Analogous to linguistic embedding space, which already has unique and agnostic embeddings for object and attribute, we shift the focus back to the visual space and propose a novel architecture that can disentangle attribute and object features in the visual space. We use visual decomposed features to hallucinate embeddings that are representative for the seen and novel compositions to better regularize the learning of our model. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing work with significant margin on three datasets: MIT-States, UT-Zappos, and a new benchmark created based on VAW.