ICLR 2026poster0 citations

Decoupling Primitive with Experts: Dynamic Feature Alignment for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Xiao Zhang, Haodong Jing, Yongqiang Ma, Nanning Zheng

Abstract

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) investigates compositional generalization capacity to recognize unknown state-object pairs based on learned primitive concepts. Existing CZSL methods typically derive primitives features through a simple composition-prototype mapping, which is suboptimal for a set of individuals that can be divided into distinct semantic subsets. Moreover, the one-to-all cross-modal primitives matching neglects compositional divergence within identical states or objects, limiting fine-grained image-composition alignment. In this study, we propose EVA, a Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Semantic Variant Alignment. Specifically, we introduce domain-expert adaption, leveraging multiple experts to achieve token-aware learning and model high-quality primitive representations. To enable accurate compositional generalization, we further present semantic variant alignment to select semantically relevant representation for image-primitives matching. Our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art CZSL methods on three popular benchmarks in both closed- and open-world settings, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed insight.

Compositional zero-shot learningMulti-modal learning
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
zhang2026decoupling,
title={Decoupling Primitive with Experts: Dynamic Feature Alignment for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning},
author={Xiao Zhang and Haodong Jing and Yongqiang Ma and Nanning Zheng},
booktitle={The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=hUtTGobe1r}
}
Decoupling Primitive with Experts: Dynamic Feature Alignment for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning · ICLR 2026