  We aim for zero-shot localization and classification of human actions in
video. Where traditional approaches rely on global attribute or object
classification scores for their zero-shot knowledge transfer, our main
contribution is a spatial-aware object embedding. To arrive at spatial
awareness, we build our embedding on top of freely available actor and object
detectors. Relevance of objects is determined in a word embedding space and
further enforced with estimated spatial preferences. Besides local object
awareness, we also embed global object awareness into our embedding to maximize
actor and object interaction. Finally, we exploit the object positions and
sizes in the spatial-aware embedding to demonstrate a new spatio-temporal
action retrieval scenario with composite queries. Action localization and
classification experiments on four contemporary action video datasets support
our proposal. Apart from state-of-the-art results in the zero-shot localization
and classification settings, our spatial-aware embedding is even competitive
with recent supervised action localization alternatives.
