Large Models are Good Annotators for Zero-Shot Learning

Human-annotated attributes serve as effective semantic label embeddings for zero-shot learning (ZSL); however, their annotation is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. Recent studies have explored weakly supervised semantic label embeddings to reduce human effort, but these methods often fail to capture visual similarity and underperform compared to human-annotated semantics. In this work, we propose a minimally supervised yet effective approach: GPT- and CLIP-powered attributes (GCAtt). Specifically, we introduce a three-step interaction process with ChatGPT-comprising preliminary design, hierarchical refinement, and specific value determination-to generate attributes that are both category-shared and discriminative for classification. Additionally, we develop a method that encodes attributes and their values as potential text pairings, leveraging CLIP's retrieval capabilities for annotation. Experimental results on four widely used benchmarks demonstrate that GCAtt consistently outperforms human-annotated semantics. Code and data are available at https://github.com/RowenaHe/GCAtt.