  Zero-shot recognition (ZSR) aims to recognize target-domain data instances of
unseen classes based on the models learned from associated pairs of seen-class
source and target domain data. One of the key challenges in ZSR is the relative
scarcity of source-domain features (e.g. one feature vector per class), which
do not fully account for wide variability in target-domain instances. In this
paper we propose a novel framework of learning data-dependent feature
transforms for scoring similarity between an arbitrary pair of source and
target data instances to account for the wide variability in target domain. Our
proposed approach is based on optimizing over a parameterized family of local
feature displacements that maximize the source-target adaptive similarity
functions. Accordingly we propose formulating zero-shot learning (ZSL) using
latent structural SVMs to learn our similarity functions from training data. As
demonstration we design a specific algorithm under the proposed framework
involving bilinear similarity functions and regularized least squares as
penalties for feature displacement. We test our approach on several benchmark
datasets for ZSR and show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art.
For instance, on aP&Y dataset we can achieve 80.89% in terms of recognition
accuracy, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 11.15%.
