  We present a simple generative framework for learning to predict previously
unseen classes, based on estimating class-attribute-gated class-conditional
distributions. We model each class-conditional distribution as an exponential
family distribution and the parameters of the distribution of each seen/unseen
class are defined as functions of the respective observed class attributes.
These functions can be learned using only the seen class data and can be used
to predict the parameters of the class-conditional distribution of each unseen
class. Unlike most existing methods for zero-shot learning that represent
classes as fixed embeddings in some vector space, our generative model
naturally represents each class as a probability distribution. It is simple to
implement and also allows leveraging additional unlabeled data from unseen
classes to improve the estimates of their class-conditional distributions using
transductive/semi-supervised learning. Moreover, it extends seamlessly to
few-shot learning by easily updating these distributions when provided with a
small number of additional labelled examples from unseen classes. Through a
comprehensive set of experiments on several benchmark data sets, we demonstrate
the efficacy of our framework.
