  Several recent publications have proposed methods for mapping images into
continuous semantic embedding spaces. In some cases the embedding space is
trained jointly with the image transformation. In other cases the semantic
embedding space is established by an independent natural language processing
task, and then the image transformation into that space is learned in a second
stage. Proponents of these image embedding systems have stressed their
advantages over the traditional \nway{} classification framing of image
understanding, particularly in terms of the promise for zero-shot learning --
the ability to correctly annotate images of previously unseen object
categories. In this paper, we propose a simple method for constructing an image
embedding system from any existing \nway{} image classifier and a semantic word
embedding model, which contains the $\n$ class labels in its vocabulary. Our
method maps images into the semantic embedding space via convex combination of
the class label embedding vectors, and requires no additional training. We show
that this simple and direct method confers many of the advantages associated
with more complex image embedding schemes, and indeed outperforms state of the
art methods on the ImageNet zero-shot learning task.

Machine Learning