  We propose Recognition as Part Composition (RPC), an image encoding approach
inspired by human cognition. It is based on the cognitive theory that humans
recognize complex objects by components, and that they build a small compact
vocabulary of concepts to represent each instance with. RPC encodes images by
first decomposing them into salient parts, and then encoding each part as a
mixture of a small number of prototypes, each representing a certain concept.
We find that this type of learning inspired by human cognition can overcome
hurdles faced by deep convolutional networks in low-shot generalization tasks,
like zero-shot learning, few-shot learning and unsupervised domain adaptation.
Furthermore, we find a classifier using an RPC image encoder is fairly robust
to adversarial attacks, that deep neural networks are known to be prone to.
Given that our image encoding principle is based on human cognition, one would
expect the encodings to be interpretable by humans, which we find to be the
case via crowd-sourcing experiments. Finally, we propose an application of
these interpretable encodings in the form of generating synthetic attribute
annotations for evaluating zero-shot learning methods on new datasets.
