  Most existing zero-shot learning methods consider the problem as a visual
semantic embedding one. Given the demonstrated capability of Generative
Adversarial Networks(GANs) to generate images, we instead leverage GANs to
imagine unseen categories from text descriptions and hence recognize novel
classes with no examples being seen. Specifically, we propose a simple yet
effective generative model that takes as input noisy text descriptions about an
unseen class (e.g.Wikipedia articles) and generates synthesized visual features
for this class. With added pseudo data, zero-shot learning is naturally
converted to a traditional classification problem. Additionally, to preserve
the inter-class discrimination of the generated features, a visual pivot
regularization is proposed as an explicit supervision. Unlike previous methods
using complex engineered regularizers, our approach can suppress the noise well
without additional regularization. Empirically, we show that our method
consistently outperforms the state of the art on the largest available
benchmarks on Text-based Zero-shot Learning.
