  Existing zero-shot learning (ZSL) models typically learn a projection
function from a feature space to a semantic embedding space (e.g.~attribute
space). However, such a projection function is only concerned with predicting
the training seen class semantic representation (e.g.~attribute prediction) or
classification. When applied to test data, which in the context of ZSL contains
different (unseen) classes without training data, a ZSL model typically suffers
from the project domain shift problem. In this work, we present a novel
solution to ZSL based on learning a Semantic AutoEncoder (SAE). Taking the
encoder-decoder paradigm, an encoder aims to project a visual feature vector
into the semantic space as in the existing ZSL models. However, the decoder
exerts an additional constraint, that is, the projection/code must be able to
reconstruct the original visual feature. We show that with this additional
reconstruction constraint, the learned projection function from the seen
classes is able to generalise better to the new unseen classes. Importantly,
the encoder and decoder are linear and symmetric which enable us to develop an
extremely efficient learning algorithm. Extensive experiments on six benchmark
datasets demonstrate that the proposed SAE outperforms significantly the
existing ZSL models with the additional benefit of lower computational cost.
Furthermore, when the SAE is applied to supervised clustering problem, it also
beats the state-of-the-art.
