Let's Transfer Transformations of Shared Semantic Representations

With a good image understanding capability, can we manipulate the images high level semantic representation? Such transformation operation can be used to generate or retrieve similar images but with a desired modification (for example changing beach background to street background); similar ability has been demonstrated in zero shot learning, attribute composition and attribute manipulation image search. In this work we show how one can learn transformations with no training examples by learning them on another domain and then transfer to the target domain. This is feasible if: first, transformation training data is more accessible in the other domain and second, both domains share similar semantics such that one can learn transformations in a shared embedding space. We demonstrate this on an image retrieval task where search query is an image, plus an additional transformation specification (for example: search for images similar to this one but background is a street instead of a beach). In one experiment, we transfer transformation from synthesized 2D blobs image to 3D rendered image, and in the other, we transfer from text domain to natural image domain.