Learning to Separate Domains in Generalized Zero-Shot and Open Set Learning: a probabilistic perspective

This paper studies the problem of domain division which aims to segment instances drawn from different probabilistic distributions. Such a problem exists in many previous recognition tasks, such as Open Set Learning (OSL) and Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (G-ZSL), where the testing instances come from either seen or novel/unseen classes of different probabilistic distributions. Previous works focused on either only calibrating the confident prediction of classifiers of seen classes (W-SVM), or taking unseen classes as outliers. In contrast, this paper proposes a probabilistic way of directly estimating and fine-tuning the decision boundary between seen and novel/unseen classes. In particular, we propose a domain division algorithm of learning to split the testing instances into known, unknown and uncertain domains, and then conduct recognize tasks in each domain. Two statistical tools, namely, bootstrapping and Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) Test, for the first time, are introduced to discover and fine-tune the decision boundary of each domain. Critically, the uncertain domain is newly introduced in our framework to adopt those instances whose domain cannot be predicted confidently. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieved the state-of-the-art performance on OSL and G-ZSL benchmarks.