Learning unseen concepts via hierarchical decomposition and composition

Composing and recognizing new concepts from known sub-concepts has been a fundamental and challenging vision task, mainly due to 1) the diversity of sub-concepts and 2) the intricate contextuality between sub-concepts and their corresponding visual features. However, most of the current methods simply treat the contextuality as rigid semantic relationships and fail to capture fine-grained contextual correlations. We propose to learn unseen concepts in a hierarchical decomposition-and-composition manner. Considering the diversity of sub-concepts, our method decomposes each seen image into visual elements according to its labels, and learns corresponding sub-concepts in their individual subspaces. To model intricate contextuality between sub-concepts and their visual features, compositions are generated from these subspaces in three hierarchical forms, and the composed concepts are learned in a unified composition space. To further refine the captured contextual relationships, adaptively semi-positive concepts are defined and then learned with pseudo supervision exploited from the generated compositions. We validate the proposed approach on two challenging benchmarks, and demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art approaches.