Successful unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is guaranteed only under strong assumptions such as covariate shift and overlap between input domains. The latter is often violated in high-dimensional applications such as image classification which, despite this challenge, continues to serve as inspiration and benchmark for algorithm development. In this work, we show that access to side information about examples from the source and target domains can help relax these assumptions and increase sample efficiency in learning, at the cost of collecting a richer variable set. We call this domain adaptation by learning using privileged information (DALUPI). Tailored for this task, we propose a simple two-stage learning algorithm inspired by our analysis and a practical end-to-end algorithm for multi-label image classification. In a suite of experiments, including an application to medical image analysis, we demonstrate that incorporating privileged information in learning can reduce errors in domain transfer compared to classical learning.
This paper presents an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method for predicting unlabeled target domain data, specific to complex UDA tasks where the domain gap is significant. Mainstream UDA models aim to learn from both domains and improve target discrimination by utilizing labeled source domain data. However, the performance boost may be limited when the discrepancy between the source and target domains is large or the target domain contains outliers. To explicitly address this issue, we propose the Adversarial self-superVised domain Adaptation network for the TARget domain (AVATAR) algorithm. It outperforms state-of-the-art UDA models by concurrently reducing domain discrepancy while enhancing discrimination through domain adversarial learning, self-supervised learning, and sample selection strategy for the target domain, all guided by deep clustering. Our proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three UDA benchmarks, and extensive ablation studies and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for addressing complex UDA tasks.
Over the past decade, domain adaptation has become a widely studied branch of transfer learning that aims to improve performance on target domains by leveraging knowledge from the source domain. Conventional domain adaptation methods often assume access to both source and target domain data simultaneously, which may not be feasible in real-world scenarios due to privacy and confidentiality concerns. As a result, the research of Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) has drawn growing attention in recent years, which only utilizes the source-trained model and unlabeled target data to adapt to the target domain. Despite the rapid explosion of SFDA work, yet there has no timely and comprehensive survey in the field. To fill this gap, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent advances in SFDA and organize them into a unified categorization scheme based on the framework of transfer learning. Instead of presenting each approach independently, we modularize several components of each method to more clearly illustrate their relationships and mechanics in light of the composite properties of each method. Furthermore, we compare the results of more than 30 representative SFDA methods on three popular classification benchmarks, namely Office-31, Office-home, and VisDA, to explore the effectiveness of various technical routes and the combination effects among them. Additionally, we briefly introduce the applications of SFDA and related fields. Drawing from our analysis of the challenges facing SFDA, we offer some insights into future research directions and potential settings.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
In the domain generalization literature, a common objective is to learn representations independent of the domain after conditioning on the class label. We show that this objective is not sufficient: there exist counter-examples where a model fails to generalize to unseen domains even after satisfying class-conditional domain invariance. We formalize this observation through a structural causal model and show the importance of modeling within-class variations for generalization. Specifically, classes contain objects that characterize specific causal features, and domains can be interpreted as interventions on these objects that change non-causal features. We highlight an alternative condition: inputs across domains should have the same representation if they are derived from the same object. Based on this objective, we propose matching-based algorithms when base objects are observed (e.g., through data augmentation) and approximate the objective when objects are not observed (MatchDG). Our simple matching-based algorithms are competitive to prior work on out-of-domain accuracy for rotated MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, PACS, and Chest-Xray datasets. Our method MatchDG also recovers ground-truth object matches: on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, top-10 matches from MatchDG have over 50% overlap with ground-truth matches.
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
While recent studies on semi-supervised learning have shown remarkable progress in leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data, most of them presume a basic setting of the model is randomly initialized. In this work, we consider semi-supervised learning and transfer learning jointly, leading to a more practical and competitive paradigm that can utilize both powerful pre-trained models from source domain as well as labeled/unlabeled data in the target domain. To better exploit the value of both pre-trained weights and unlabeled target examples, we introduce adaptive consistency regularization that consists of two complementary components: Adaptive Knowledge Consistency (AKC) on the examples between the source and target model, and Adaptive Representation Consistency (ARC) on the target model between labeled and unlabeled examples. Examples involved in the consistency regularization are adaptively selected according to their potential contributions to the target task. We conduct extensive experiments on several popular benchmarks including CUB-200-2011, MIT Indoor-67, MURA, by fine-tuning the ImageNet pre-trained ResNet-50 model. Results show that our proposed adaptive consistency regularization outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning techniques such as Pseudo Label, Mean Teacher, and MixMatch. Moreover, our algorithm is orthogonal to existing methods and thus able to gain additional improvements on top of MixMatch and FixMatch. Our code is available at //github.com/SHI-Labs/Semi-Supervised-Transfer-Learning.
Conventional unsupervised multi-source domain adaptation (UMDA) methods assume all source domains can be accessed directly. This neglects the privacy-preserving policy, that is, all the data and computations must be kept decentralized. There exists three problems in this scenario: (1) Minimizing the domain distance requires the pairwise calculation of the data from source and target domains, which is not accessible. (2) The communication cost and privacy security limit the application of UMDA methods (e.g., the domain adversarial training). (3) Since users have no authority to check the data quality, the irrelevant or malicious source domains are more likely to appear, which causes negative transfer. In this study, we propose a privacy-preserving UMDA paradigm named Knowledge Distillation based Decentralized Domain Adaptation (KD3A), which performs domain adaptation through the knowledge distillation on models from different source domains. KD3A solves the above problems with three components: (1) A multi-source knowledge distillation method named Knowledge Vote to learn high-quality domain consensus knowledge. (2) A dynamic weighting strategy named Consensus Focus to identify both the malicious and irrelevant domains. (3) A decentralized optimization strategy for domain distance named BatchNorm MMD. The extensive experiments on DomainNet demonstrate that KD3A is robust to the negative transfer and brings a 100x reduction of communication cost compared with other decentralized UMDA methods. Moreover, our KD3A significantly outperforms state-of-the-art UMDA approaches.
We present a new method to learn video representations from large-scale unlabeled video data. Ideally, this representation will be generic and transferable, directly usable for new tasks such as action recognition and zero or few-shot learning. We formulate unsupervised representation learning as a multi-modal, multi-task learning problem, where the representations are shared across different modalities via distillation. Further, we introduce the concept of loss function evolution by using an evolutionary search algorithm to automatically find optimal combination of loss functions capturing many (self-supervised) tasks and modalities. Thirdly, we propose an unsupervised representation evaluation metric using distribution matching to a large unlabeled dataset as a prior constraint, based on Zipf's law. This unsupervised constraint, which is not guided by any labeling, produces similar results to weakly-supervised, task-specific ones. The proposed unsupervised representation learning results in a single RGB network and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it is also more effective than several label-based methods (e.g., ImageNet), with the exception of large, fully labeled video datasets.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have pushed the state-of-the art for semantic segmentation provided that a large amount of images together with pixel-wise annotations is available. Data collection is expensive and a solution to alleviate it is to use transfer learning. This reduces the amount of annotated data required for the network training but it does not get rid of this heavy processing step. We propose a method of transfer learning without annotations on the target task for datasets with redundant content and distinct pixel distributions. Our method takes advantage of the approximate content alignment of the images between two datasets when the approximation error prevents the reuse of annotation from one dataset to another. Given the annotations for only one dataset, we train a first network in a supervised manner. This network autonomously learns to generate deep data representations relevant to the semantic segmentation. Then the images in the new dataset, we train a new network to generate a deep data representation that matches the one from the first network on the previous dataset. The training consists in a regression between feature maps and does not require any annotations on the new dataset. We show that this method reaches performances similar to a classic transfer learning on the PASCAL VOC dataset with synthetic transformations.
Convolutional networks (ConvNets) have achieved great successes in various challenging vision tasks. However, the performance of ConvNets would degrade when encountering the domain shift. The domain adaptation is more significant while challenging in the field of biomedical image analysis, where cross-modality data have largely different distributions. Given that annotating the medical data is especially expensive, the supervised transfer learning approaches are not quite optimal. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework with adversarial learning for cross-modality biomedical image segmentations. Specifically, our model is based on a dilated fully convolutional network for pixel-wise prediction. Moreover, we build a plug-and-play domain adaptation module (DAM) to map the target input to features which are aligned with source domain feature space. A domain critic module (DCM) is set up for discriminating the feature space of both domains. We optimize the DAM and DCM via an adversarial loss without using any target domain label. Our proposed method is validated by adapting a ConvNet trained with MRI images to unpaired CT data for cardiac structures segmentations, and achieved very promising results.