  We propose a novel framework called Semantics-Preserving Adversarial
Embedding Network (SP-AEN) for zero-shot visual recognition (ZSL), where test
images and their classes are both unseen during training. SP-AEN aims to tackle
the inherent problem --- semantic loss --- in the prevailing family of
embedding-based ZSL, where some semantics would be discarded during training if
they are non-discriminative for training classes, but could become critical for
recognizing test classes. Specifically, SP-AEN prevents the semantic loss by
introducing an independent visual-to-semantic space embedder which disentangles
the semantic space into two subspaces for the two arguably conflicting
objectives: classification and reconstruction. Through adversarial learning of
the two subspaces, SP-AEN can transfer the semantics from the reconstructive
subspace to the discriminative one, accomplishing the improved zero-shot
recognition of unseen classes. Comparing with prior works, SP-AEN can not only
improve classification but also generate photo-realistic images, demonstrating
the effectiveness of semantic preservation. On four popular benchmarks: CUB,
AWA, SUN and aPY, SP-AEN considerably outperforms other state-of-the-art
methods by an absolute performance difference of 12.2\%, 9.3\%, 4.0\%, and
3.6\% in terms of harmonic mean values
