Learning Abstract Classes using Deep Learning

Humans are generally good at learning abstract concepts about objects and scenes (e.g.\ spatial orientation, relative sizes, etc.). Over the last years convolutional neural networks have achieved almost human performance in recognizing concrete classes (i.e.\ specific object categories). This paper tests the performance of a current CNN (GoogLeNet) on the task of differentiating between abstract classes which are trivially differentiable for humans. We trained and tested the CNN on the two abstract classes of horizontal and vertical orientation and determined how well the network is able to transfer the learned classes to other, previously unseen objects.