SketchEmbedNet: Learning Novel Concepts by Imitating Drawings
Authors: Alexander Wang, Mengye Ren, Richard Zemel
Keywords: generative, probabilistic, sketch, drawing, few-shot learning, classification, embedding learning
Abstract: Sketch drawings are an intuitive visual domain that appeals to human instinct. Previous work has shown that recurrent neural networks are capable of producing sketch drawings of a single or few classes at a time. In this work we investigate representations developed by training a generative model to produce sketches from pixel images across many classes in a sketch domain. We find that the embeddings learned by this sketching model are extremely informative for visual tasks and infer a unique visual understanding. We then use them to exceed state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised few-shot classification on the Omniglot and mini-ImageNet benchmarks. We also leverage the generative capacity of our model to produce high quality sketches of novel classes based on just a single example.