Zero-shot Synthesis with Group-Supervised Learning
Authors: Yunhao Ge,Sami Abu-El-Haija,Gan Xin,Laurent Itti

Abstract: Visual cognition of primates is superior to that of artificial neural networks in its ability to “envision” a visual object, even a newly-introduced one, in different attributes including pose, position, color, texture, etc.  To aid neural networks to envision objects with different attributes,  we propose a family of objective functions, expressed on groups of examples, as a novel learning framework that we term Group-Supervised Learning (GSL). GSL allows us to decompose inputs into a disentangled representation with swappable components, that can be recombined to synthesize new samples.  For instance, images of red boats & blue cars can be decomposed and recombined to synthesize novel images of red cars.   We propose an implementation based on auto-encoder, termed group-supervised zero-shot synthesis network (GZS-Net) trained with our learning framework, that can produce a high-quality red car even if no such example is witnessed during training. We test our model and learning framework on existing benchmarks, in addition to a new dataset that we open-source. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that GZS-Net trained with GSL outperforms state-of-the-art methods