Sketch-an-Anchor: Sub-epoch Fast Model Adaptation for Zero-shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval

Abstract: Sketch-an-Anchor is a novel method to train state-of-the-art Zero-shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval (ZSSBIR) models in under an epoch. Most studies break down the problem of ZSSBIR into two parts: domain alignment between images and sketches, inherited from SBIR, and generalization to unseen data, inherent to the zero-shot protocol. We argue one of these problems can be considerably simplified and re-frame the ZSSBIR problem around the already-stellar yet underexplored Zero-shot Image-based Retrieval performance of off-the-shelf models. Our fast-converging model keeps the single-domain performance while learning to extract similar representations from sketches. To this end we introduce our Semantic Anchors -- guiding embeddings learned from word-based semantic spaces and features from off-the-shelf models -- and combine them with our novel Anchored Contrastive Loss. Empirical evidence shows we can achieve state-of-the-art performance on all benchmark datasets while training for 100x less iterations than other methods.