  When training samples are scarce, the semantic embedding technique, ie,
describing class labels with attributes, provides a condition to generate
visual features for unseen objects by transferring the knowledge from seen
objects. However, semantic descriptions are usually obtained in an external
paradigm, such as manual annotation, resulting in weak consistency between
descriptions and visual features. In this paper, we refine the coarse-grained
semantic description for any-shot learning tasks, ie, zero-shot learning (ZSL),
generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL), and few-shot learning (FSL). A new
model, namely, the semantic refinement Wasserstein generative adversarial
network (SRWGAN) model, is designed with the proposed multihead representation
and hierarchical alignment techniques. Unlike conventional methods, semantic
refinement is performed with the aim of identifying a bias-eliminated condition
for disjoint-class feature generation and is applicable in both inductive and
transductive settings. We extensively evaluate model performance on six
benchmark datasets and observe state-of-the-art results for any-shot learning;
eg, we obtain 70.2% harmonic accuracy for the Caltech UCSD Birds (CUB) dataset
and 82.2% harmonic accuracy for the Oxford Flowers (FLO) dataset in the
standard GZSL setting. Various visualizations are also provided to show the
bias-eliminated generation of SRWGAN. Our code is available.
