Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is a problem setup in deep learning where, at test time, a learner observes samples from classes which were not observed during training, and needs to predict the class that they belong to. The name is a play on words based on the earlier concept of one-shot learning, in which classification can be learned from only one, or a few, examples.
Zero-shot methods generally work by associating observed and non-observed classes through some form of auxiliary information, which encodes observable distinguishing properties of objects. [1] For example, given a set of images of animals to be classified, along with auxiliary textual descriptions of what animals look like, an artificial intelligence model which has been trained to recognize horses, but has never been given a zebra, can still recognize a zebra when it also knows that zebras look like striped horses. This problem is widely studied in computer vision, natural language processing, and machine perception. [2]
The first paper on zero-shot learning in natural language processing appeared in a 2008 paper by Chang, Ratinov, Roth, and Srikumar, at the AAAI’08, but the name given to the learning paradigm there was dataless classification. [3] The first paper on zero-shot learning in computer vision appeared at the same conference, under the name zero-data learning. [4] The term zero-shot learning itself first appeared in the literature in a 2009 paper from Palatucci, Hinton, Pomerleau, and Mitchell at NIPS’09. [5] This terminology was repeated later in another computer vision paper [6] and the term zero-shot learning caught on, as a take-off on one-shot learning that was introduced in computer vision years earlier. [7]
In computer vision, zero-shot learning models learned parameters for seen classes along with their class representations and rely on representational similarity among class labels so that, during inference, instances can be classified into new classes.
In natural language processing, the key technical direction developed builds on the ability to "understand the labels"—represent the labels in the same semantic space as that of the documents to be classified. This supports the classification of a single example without observing any annotated data, the purest form of zero-shot classification. The original paper [3] made use of the Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) representation but later papers made use of other representations, including dense representations. This approach was also extended to multilingual domains, [8] [9] fine entity typing [10] and other problems. Moreover, beyond relying solely on representations, the computational approach has been extended to depend on transfer from other tasks, such as textual entailment [11] and question answering. [12]
The original paper [3] also points out that, beyond the ability to classify a single example, when a collection of examples is given, with the assumption that they come from the same distribution, it is possible to bootstrap the performance in a semi-supervised like manner (or transductive learning).
Unlike standard generalization in machine learning, where classifiers are expected to correctly classify new samples to classes they have already observed during training, in ZSL, no samples from the classes have been given during training the classifier. It can therefore be viewed as an extreme case of domain adaptation.
Naturally, some form of auxiliary information has to be given about these zero-shot classes, and this type of information can be of several types.
The above ZSL setup assumes that at test time, only zero-shot samples are given, namely, samples from new unseen classes. In generalized zero-shot learning, samples from both new and known classes, may appear at test time. This poses new challenges for classifiers at test time, because it is very challenging to estimate if a given sample is new or known. Some approaches to handle this include:
Zero shot learning has been applied to the following fields:
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related to information retrieval, knowledge representation and computational linguistics, a subfield of linguistics. Typically data is collected in text corpora, using either rule-based, statistical or neural-based approaches in machine learning and deep learning.
Word-sense disambiguation is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious.
In machine learning, boosting is an ensemble meta-algorithm for primarily reducing bias, variance. It is used in supervised learning and a family of machine learning algorithms that convert weak learners to strong ones.
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In computer vision, the problem of object categorization from image search is the problem of training a classifier to recognize categories of objects, using only the images retrieved automatically with an Internet search engine. Ideally, automatic image collection would allow classifiers to be trained with nothing but the category names as input. This problem is closely related to that of content-based image retrieval (CBIR), where the goal is to return better image search results rather than training a classifier for image recognition.
Object detection is a computer technology related to computer vision and image processing that deals with detecting instances of semantic objects of a certain class in digital images and videos. Well-researched domains of object detection include face detection and pedestrian detection. Object detection has applications in many areas of computer vision, including image retrieval and video surveillance.
In machine learning and statistical classification, multiclass classification or multinomial classification is the problem of classifying instances into one of three or more classes. For example, deciding on whether an image is showing a banana, an orange, or an apple is a multiclass classification problem, with three possible classes, while deciding on whether an image contains an apple or not is a binary classification problem.
In machine learning, feature learning or representation learning is a set of techniques that allows a system to automatically discover the representations needed for feature detection or classification from raw data. This replaces manual feature engineering and allows a machine to both learn the features and use them to perform a specific task.
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In natural language processing (NLP), a word embedding is a representation of a word. The embedding is used in text analysis. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that the words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning. Word embeddings can be obtained using language modeling and feature learning techniques, where words or phrases from the vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers.
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Dan Roth is the Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the Chief AI Scientist at Oracle. Until June 2024 Dan was a VP/Distinguished Scientist at AWS AI. In his role at AWS Roth led over the last three years the scientific effort behind the first-generation Generative AI products from AWS, including Titan Models, Amazon Q efforts, and Bedrock, from inception until they became generally available.
This glossary of artificial intelligence is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to the study of artificial intelligence, its sub-disciplines, and related fields. Related glossaries include Glossary of computer science, Glossary of robotics, and Glossary of machine vision.
Semantic parsing is the task of converting a natural language utterance to a logical form: a machine-understandable representation of its meaning. Semantic parsing can thus be understood as extracting the precise meaning of an utterance. Applications of semantic parsing include machine translation, question answering, ontology induction, automated reasoning, and code generation. The phrase was first used in the 1970s by Yorick Wilks as the basis for machine translation programs working with only semantic representations. Semantic parsing is one of the important tasks in computational linguistics and natural language processing.
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