Learning to Transfer: Generalizable Attribute Learning with Multitask Neural Model Search

As attribute leaning brings mid-level semantic properties for objects, it can benefit many traditional learning problems in multimedia and computer vision communities. When facing the huge number of attributes, it is extremely challenging to automatically design a generalizable neural network for other attribute learning tasks. Even for a specific attribute domain, the exploration of the neural network architecture is always optimized by a combination of heuristics and grid search, from which there is a large space of possible choices to be searched. In this paper, Generalizable Attribute Learning Model (GALM) is proposed to automatically design the neural networks for generalizable attribute learning. The main novelty of GALM is that it fully exploits the Multi-Task Learning and Reinforcement Learning to speed up the search procedure. With the help of parameter sharing, GALM is able to transfer the pre-searched architecture to different attribute domains. In experiments, we comprehensively evaluate GALM on 251 attributes from three domains: animals, objects, and scenes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GALM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art attribute learning approaches and previous neural architecture search methods on two generalizable attribute learning scenarios.