Domain adaptation has shown appealing performance by leveraging knowledge from a source domain with rich annotations. However, for a specific target task, it is cumbersome to collect related and high-quality source domains. In real-world scenarios, large-scale datasets corrupted with noisy labels are easy to collect, stimulating a great demand for automatic recognition in a generalized setting, i.e., weakly-supervised partial domain adaptation (WS-PDA), which transfers a classifier from a large source domain with noises in labels to a small unlabeled target domain. As such, the key issues of WS-PDA are: 1) how to sufficiently discover the knowledge from the noisy labeled source domain and the unlabeled target domain, and 2) how to successfully adapt the knowledge across domains. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective domain adaptation approach, termed as self-paced transfer classifier learning (SP-TCL), to address the above issues, which could be regarded as a well-performing baseline for several generalized domain adaptation tasks. The proposed model is established upon the self-paced learning scheme, seeking a preferable classifier for the target domain. Specifically, SP-TCL learns to discover faithful knowledge via a carefully designed prudent loss function and simultaneously adapts the learned knowledge to the target domain by iteratively excluding source examples from training under the self-paced fashion. Extensive evaluations on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that SP-TCL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on several generalized domain adaptation tasks.
In this paper, we investigate Source-free Open-partial Domain Adaptation (SF-OPDA), which addresses the situation where there exist both domain and category shifts between source and target domains. Under the SF-OPDA setting, which aims to address data privacy concerns, the model cannot access source data anymore during target adaptation. We propose a novel training scheme to learn a (n+1)-way classifier to predict the n source classes and the unknown class, where samples of only known source categories are available for training. Furthermore, for target adaptation, we simply adopt a weighted entropy minimization to adapt the source pretrained model to the unlabeled target domain without source data. In experiments, we show our simple method surpasses current OPDA approaches which demand source data during adaptation. When augmented with a closed-set domain adaptation approach during target adaptation, our source-free method further outperforms the current state-of-the-art OPDA method by 2.5%, 7.2% and 13% on Office-31, Office-Home and VisDA respectively.
Domain adaptation targets at knowledge acquisition and dissemination from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain under distribution shift. Still, the common requirement of identical class space shared across domains hinders applications of domain adaptation to partial-set domains. Recent advances show that deep pre-trained models of large scale endow rich knowledge to tackle diverse downstream tasks of small scale. Thus, there is a strong incentive to adapt models from large-scale domains to small-scale domains. This paper introduces Partial Domain Adaptation (PDA), a learning paradigm that relaxes the identical class space assumption to that the source class space subsumes the target class space. First, we present a theoretical analysis of partial domain adaptation, which uncovers the importance of estimating the transferable probability of each class and each instance across domains. Then, we propose Selective Adversarial Network (SAN and SAN++) with a bi-level selection strategy and an adversarial adaptation mechanism. The bi-level selection strategy up-weighs each class and each instance simultaneously for source supervised training, target self-training, and source-target adversarial adaptation through the transferable probability estimated alternately by the model. Experiments on standard partial-set datasets and more challenging tasks with superclasses show that SAN++ outperforms several domain adaptation methods.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a well-labeled source domain to a different but related unlabeled target domain with identical label space. Currently, the main workhorse for solving UDA is domain alignment, which has proven successful. However, it is often difficult to find an appropriate source domain with identical label space. A more practical scenario is so-called partial domain adaptation (PDA) in which the source label set or space subsumes the target one. Unfortunately, in PDA, due to the existence of the irrelevant categories in the source domain, it is quite hard to obtain a perfect alignment, thus resulting in mode collapse and negative transfer. Although several efforts have been made by down-weighting the irrelevant source categories, the strategies used tend to be burdensome and risky since exactly which irrelevant categories are unknown. These challenges motivate us to find a relatively simpler alternative to solve PDA. To achieve this, we first provide a thorough theoretical analysis, which illustrates that the target risk is bounded by both model smoothness and between-domain discrepancy. Considering the difficulty of perfect alignment in solving PDA, we turn to focus on the model smoothness while discard the riskier domain alignment to enhance the adaptability of the model. Specifically, we instantiate the model smoothness as a quite simple intra-domain structure preserving (IDSP). To our best knowledge, this is the first naive attempt to address the PDA without domain alignment. Finally, our empirical results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that IDSP is not only superior to the PDA SOTAs by a significant margin on some benchmarks (e.g., +10% on Cl->Rw and +8% on Ar->Rw ), but also complementary to domain alignment in the standard UDA
Mini-batch optimal transport (m-OT) has been widely used recently to deal with the memory issue of OT in large-scale applications. Despite their practicality, m-OT suffers from misspecified mappings, namely, mappings that are optimal on the mini-batch level but are partially wrong in the comparison with the optimal transportation plan between the original measures. Motivated by the misspecified mappings issue, we propose a novel mini-batch method by using partial optimal transport (POT) between mini-batch empirical measures, which we refer to as mini-batch partial optimal transport (m-POT). Leveraging the insight from the partial transportation, we explain the source of misspecified mappings from the m-OT and motivate why limiting the amount of transported masses among mini-batches via POT can alleviate the incorrect mappings. Finally, we carry out extensive experiments on various applications such as deep domain adaptation, partial domain adaptation, deep generative model, color transfer, and gradient flow to demonstrate the favorable performance of m-POT compared to current mini-batch methods.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to classify unlabeled target domain by transferring knowledge from labeled source domain with domain shift. Most of the existing UDA methods try to mitigate the adverse impact induced by the shift via reducing domain discrepancy. However, such approaches easily suffer a notorious mode collapse issue due to the lack of labels in target domain. Naturally, one of the effective ways to mitigate this issue is to reliably estimate the pseudo labels for target domain, which itself is hard. To overcome this, we propose a novel UDA method named Progressive Adaptation of Subspaces approach (PAS) in which we utilize such an intuition that appears much reasonable to gradually obtain reliable pseudo labels. Speci fically, we progressively and steadily refine the shared subspaces as bridge of knowledge transfer by adaptively anchoring/selecting and leveraging those target samples with reliable pseudo labels. Subsequently, the refined subspaces can in turn provide more reliable pseudo-labels of the target domain, making the mode collapse highly mitigated. Our thorough evaluation demonstrates that PAS is not only effective for common UDA, but also outperforms the state-of-the arts for more challenging Partial Domain Adaptation (PDA) situation, where the source label set subsumes the target one.
Deep domain adaptation methods have achieved appealing performance by learning transferable representations from a well-labeled source domain to a different but related unlabeled target domain. Most existing works assume source and target data share the identical label space, which is often difficult to be satisfied in many real-world applications. With the emergence of big data, there is a more practical scenario called partial domain adaptation, where we are always accessible to a more large-scale source domain while working on a relative small-scale target domain. In this case, the conventional domain adaptation assumption should be relaxed, and the target label space tends to be a subset of the source label space. Intuitively, reinforcing the positive effects of the most relevant source subclasses and reducing the negative impacts of irrelevant source subclasses are of vital importance to address partial domain adaptation challenge. This paper proposes an efficiently-implemented Deep Residual Correction Network (DRCN) by plugging one residual block into the source network along with the task-specific feature layer, which effectively enhances the adaptation from source to target and explicitly weakens the influence from the irrelevant source classes. Specifically, the plugged residual block, which consists of several fully-connected layers, could deepen basic network and boost its feature representation capability correspondingly. Moreover, we design a weighted class-wise domain alignment loss to couple two domains by matching the feature distributions of shared classes between source and target. Comprehensive experiments on partial, traditional and fine-grained cross-domain visual recognition demonstrate that DRCN is superior to the competitive deep domain adaptation approaches.
This work addresses the unsupervised domain adaptation problem, especially in the case of class labels in the target domain being only a subset of those in the source domain. Such a partial transfer setting is realistic but challenging and existing methods always suffer from two key problems, negative transfer and uncertainty propagation. In this paper, we build on domain adversarial learning and propose a novel domain adaptation method BA$^3$US with two new techniques termed Balanced Adversarial Alignment (BAA) and Adaptive Uncertainty Suppression (AUS), respectively. On one hand, negative transfer results in misclassification of target samples to the classes only present in the source domain. To address this issue, BAA pursues the balance between label distributions across domains in a fairly simple manner. Specifically, it randomly leverages a few source samples to augment the smaller target domain during domain alignment so that classes in different domains are symmetric. On the other hand, a source sample would be denoted as uncertain if there is an incorrect class that has a relatively high prediction score, and such uncertainty easily propagates to unlabeled target data around it during alignment, which severely deteriorates adaptation performance. Thus we present AUS that emphasizes uncertain samples and exploits an adaptive weighted complement entropy objective to encourage incorrect classes to have uniform and low prediction scores. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate our BA$^3$US surpasses state-of-the-arts for partial domain adaptation tasks. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/tim-learn/BA3US}.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to leverage the knowledge learned from a labeled source dataset to solve similar tasks in a new unlabeled domain. Prior UDA methods typically require to access the source data when learning to adapt the model, making them risky and inefficient for decentralized private data. This work tackles a practical setting where only a trained source model is available and investigates how we can effectively utilize such a model without source data to solve UDA problems. We propose a simple yet generic representation learning framework, named \emph{Source HypOthesis Transfer} (SHOT). SHOT freezes the classifier module (hypothesis) of the source model and learns the target-specific feature extraction module by exploiting both information maximization and self-supervised pseudo-labeling to implicitly align representations from the target domains to the source hypothesis. To verify its versatility, we evaluate SHOT in a variety of adaptation cases including closed-set, partial-set, and open-set domain adaptation. Experiments indicate that SHOT yields state-of-the-art results among multiple domain adaptation benchmarks.
Unsupervised domain adaptation methods traditionally assume that all source categories are present in the target domain. In practice, little may be known about the category overlap between the two domains. While some methods address target settings with either partial or open-set categories, they assume that the particular setting is known a priori. We propose a more universally applicable domain adaptation framework that can handle arbitrary category shift, called Domain Adaptative Neighborhood Clustering via Entropy optimization (DANCE). DANCE combines two novel ideas: First, as we cannot fully rely on source categories to learn features discriminative for the target, we propose a novel neighborhood clustering technique to learn the structure of the target domain in a self-supervised way. Second, we use entropy-based feature alignment and rejection to align target features with the source, or reject them as unknown categories based on their entropy. We show through extensive experiments that DANCE outperforms baselines across open-set, open-partial and partial domain adaptation settings. Implementation is available at https://github.com/VisionLearningGroup/DANCE.
There are a variety of Domain Adaptation (DA) scenarios subject to label sets and domain configurations, including closed-set and partial-set DA, as well as multi-source and multi-target DA. It is notable that existing DA methods are generally designed only for a specific scenario, and may underperform for scenarios they are not tailored to. To this end, this paper studies Versatile Domain Adaptation (VDA), where one method can handle several different DA scenarios without any modification. Towards this goal, a more general inductive bias other than the domain alignment should be explored. We delve into a missing piece of existing methods: class confusion, the tendency that a classifier confuses the predictions between the correct and ambiguous classes for target examples, which is common in different DA scenarios. We uncover that reducing such pairwise class confusion leads to significant transfer gains. With this insight, we propose a general loss function: Minimum Class Confusion (MCC). It can be characterized as (1) a non-adversarial DA method without explicitly deploying domain alignment, enjoying faster convergence speed; (2) a versatile approach that can handle four existing scenarios: Closed-Set, Partial-Set, Multi-Source, and Multi-Target DA, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods in these scenarios, especially on one of the largest and hardest datasets to date (7.3% on DomainNet). Its versatility is further justified by two scenarios proposed in this paper: Multi-Source Partial DA and Multi-Target Partial DA. In addition, it can also be used as a general regularizer that is orthogonal and complementary to a variety of existing DA methods, accelerating convergence and pushing these readily competitive methods to stronger ones. Code is available at https://github.com/thuml/Versatile-Domain-Adaptation.
Domain adaptation enables the learner to safely generalize into novel environments by mitigating domain shifts across distributions. Previous works may not effectively uncover the underlying reasons that would lead to the drastic model degradation on the target task. In this paper, we empirically reveal that the erratic discrimination of the target domain mainly stems from its much smaller feature norms with respect to that of the source domain. To this end, we propose a novel parameter-free Adaptive Feature Norm approach. We demonstrate that progressively adapting the feature norms of the two domains to a large range of values can result in significant transfer gains, implying that those task-specific features with larger norms are more transferable. Our method successfully unifies the computation of both standard and partial domain adaptation with more robustness against the negative transfer issue. Without bells and whistles but a few lines of code, our method substantially lifts the performance on the target task and exceeds state-of-the-arts by a large margin (11.5% on Office-Home and 17.1% on VisDA2017). We hope our simple yet effective approach will shed some light on the future research of transfer learning. Code is available at https://github.com/jihanyang/AFN.
Domain adversarial learning aligns the feature distributions across the source and target domains in a two-player minimax game. Existing domain adversarial networks generally assume identical label space across different domains. In the presence of big data, there is strong motivation of transferring deep models from existing big domains to unknown small domains. This paper introduces partial domain adaptation as a new domain adaptation scenario, which relaxes the fully shared label space assumption to that the source label space subsumes the target label space. Previous methods typically match the whole source domain to the target domain, which are vulnerable to negative transfer for the partial domain adaptation problem due to the large mismatch between label spaces. We present Partial Adversarial Domain Adaptation (PADA), which simultaneously alleviates negative transfer by down-weighing the data of outlier source classes for training both source classifier and domain adversary, and promotes positive transfer by matching the feature distributions in the shared label space. Experiments show that PADA exceeds state-of-the-art results for partial domain adaptation tasks on several datasets.