  Attribute-based recognition models, due to their impressive performance and
their ability to generalize well on novel categories, have been widely adopted
for many computer vision applications. However, usually both the attribute
vocabulary and the class-attribute associations have to be provided manually by
domain experts or large number of annotators. This is very costly and not
necessarily optimal regarding recognition performance, and most importantly, it
limits the applicability of attribute-based models to large scale data sets. To
tackle this problem, we propose an end-to-end unsupervised attribute learning
approach. We utilize online text corpora to automatically discover a salient
and discriminative vocabulary that correlates well with the human concept of
semantic attributes. Moreover, we propose a deep convolutional model to
optimize class-attribute associations with a linguistic prior that accounts for
noise and missing data in text. In a thorough evaluation on ImageNet, we
demonstrate that our model is able to efficiently discover and learn semantic
attributes at a large scale. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our model
outperforms the state-of-the-art in zero-shot learning on three data sets:
ImageNet, Animals with Attributes and aPascal/aYahoo. Finally, we enable
attribute-based learning on ImageNet and will share the attributes and
associations for future research.
