Although it is challenging for a machine to achieve, humans are able to learn new concepts by transferring knowledge from known to unknown domains based on high-level descriptions and semantic representations (Thrun and Pratt, 1998).
without labelled data of unseen classes, a zero-shot learning framework is expected to exploit supportive semantic knowledge (e.g., class descriptions, relations among classes, and external domain knowledge) to generally infer the features of unseen classes using patterns learned from seen classes.