  Attributes are semantically meaningful characteristics whose applicability
widely crosses category boundaries. They are particularly important in
describing and recognizing concepts where no explicit training example is
given, \textit{e.g., zero-shot learning}. Additionally, since attributes are
human describable, they can be used for efficient human-computer interaction.
In this paper, we propose to employ semantic segmentation to improve facial
attribute prediction. The core idea lies in the fact that many facial
attributes describe local properties. In other words, the probability of an
attribute to appear in a face image is far from being uniform in the spatial
domain. We build our facial attribute prediction model jointly with a deep
semantic segmentation network. This harnesses the localization cues learned by
the semantic segmentation to guide the attention of the attribute prediction to
the regions where different attributes naturally show up. As a result of this
approach, in addition to recognition, we are able to localize the attributes,
despite merely having access to image level labels (weak supervision) during
training. We evaluate our proposed method on CelebA and LFWA datasets and
achieve superior results to the prior arts. Furthermore, we show that in the
reverse problem, semantic face parsing improves when facial attributes are
available. That reaffirms the need to jointly model these two interconnected
tasks.
