  This paper addresses the task of learning an image clas-sifier when some
categories are defined by semantic descriptions only (e.g. visual attributes)
while the others are defined by exemplar images as well. This task is often
referred to as the Zero-Shot classification task (ZSC). Most of the previous
methods rely on learning a common embedding space allowing to compare visual
features of unknown categories with semantic descriptions. This paper argues
that these approaches are limited as i) efficient discrimi-native classifiers
can't be used ii) classification tasks with seen and unseen categories
(Generalized Zero-Shot Classification or GZSC) can't be addressed efficiently.
In contrast , this paper suggests to address ZSC and GZSC by i) learning a
conditional generator using seen classes ii) generate artificial training
examples for the categories without exemplars. ZSC is then turned into a
standard supervised learning problem. Experiments with 4 generative models and
5 datasets experimentally validate the approach, giving state-of-the-art
results on both ZSC and GZSC.
