Abstract In this work, we tackle the zero-shot metric learning problem and propose a novel method abbreviated as ZSML, with the purpose to learn a distance metric that measures the similarity of unseen categories (even unseen datasets). ZSML achieves strong transferability by capturing multi-nonlinear yet continuous relation among data. It is motivated by two facts: 1) relations can be essentially described from various perspectives; and 2) traditional binary supervision is insufficient to represent continuous visual similarity. Specifically, we first reformulate a collection of specific-shaped convolutional kernels to combine data pairs and generate multiple relation vectors. Furthermore, we design a new cross-update regression loss to discover continuous similarity. Extensive experiments including intra-dataset transfer and inter-dataset transfer on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that ZSML can achieve state-of-the-art performance