Mitigating Uncertainty of Classifier for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (original) (raw)

Stochastic Classifiers for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020

A common strategy adopted by existing state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods is to employ two classifiers to identify the misaligned local regions between a source and target domain. Following the 'wisdom of the crowd' principle, one has to ask: why stop at two? Indeed, we find that using more classifiers leads to better performance, but also introduces more model parameters, therefore risking overfitting. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called STochastic clAssifieRs (STAR) for addressing this problem. Instead of representing one classifier as a weight vector, STAR models it as a Gaussian distribution with its variance representing the interclassifier discrepancy. With STAR, we can now sample an arbitrary number of classifiers from the distribution, whilst keeping the model size the same as having two classifiers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that a variety of existing UDA methods can greatly benefit from STAR and achieve the state-of-the-art performance on both image classification and semantic segmentation tasks.

Agnostic Domain Adaptation

The supervised learning paradigm assumes in general that both training and test data are sampled from the same distribution. When this assumption is violated, we are in the setting of transfer learning or domain adaptation: Here, training data from a source domain, aim to learn a classi er which performs well on a target domain governed by a di efrent distribution. We pursue an agnostic approach, assuming no information about the shift between source and target distributions but relying exclusively on unlabeled data from the target domain. Previous works [2] suggest that feature representations, which are invariant to domain change, increases generalization. Extending these ideas, we prove a generalization bound for domain adaptation that identi es the transfer mechanism: what matters is how much learnt classier itself is invariant, while feature representations may vary. Our bound is much tighter for rich hypothesis classes, which may only contain invariant classi er, but can not be invariant altogether. This concept is exempli ed by the computer vision tasks of semantic segmentation and image categorization. Domain shift is simulated by introducing some common imaging distortions, such as gamma transform and color temperature shift. Our experiments on a public benchmark dataset con rm that using domain adapted classi er signi cantly improves accuracy when distribution changes are present.

Attending to Discriminative Certainty for Domain Adaptation

2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019

In this paper, we aim to solve for unsupervised domain adaptation of classifiers where we have access to label information for the source domain while these are not available for a target domain. While various methods have been proposed for solving these including adversarial discriminator based methods, most approaches have focused on the entire image based domain adaptation. In an image, there would be regions that can be adapted better, for instance, the foreground object may be similar in nature. To obtain such regions, we propose methods that consider the probabilistic certainty estimate of various regions and specify focus on these during classification for adaptation. We observe that just by incorporating the probabilistic certainty of the discriminator while training the classifier, we are able to obtain state of the art results on various datasets as compared against all the recent methods. We provide a thorough empirical analysis of the method by providing ablation analysis, statistical significance test, and visualization of the attention maps and t-SNE embeddings. These evaluations convincingly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Distributionally Robust Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

ArXiv, 2020

We propose a distributionally robust learning (DRL) method for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) that scales to modern computer vision benchmarks. DRL can be naturally formulated as a competitive two-player game between a predictor and an adversary that is allowed to corrupt the labels, subject to certain constraints, and reduces to incorporating a density ratio between the source and target domains (under the standard log loss). This formulation motivates the use of two neural networks that are jointly trained - a discriminative network between the source and target domains for density-ratio estimation, in addition to the standard classification network. The use of a density ratio in DRL prevents the model from being overconfident on target inputs far away from the source domain. Thus, DRL provides conservative confidence estimation in the target domain, even when the target labels are not available. This conservatism motivates the use of DRL in self-training for sample selectio...

IT-RUDA: Information Theory Assisted Robust Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

arXiv (Cornell University), 2022

Distribution shift between train (source) and test (target) datasets is a common problem encountered in machine learning applications. One approach to resolve this issue is to use the Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) technique that carries out knowledge transfer from a label-rich source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Outliers that exist in either source or target datasets can introduce additional challenges when using UDA in practice. In this paper, αdivergence is used as a measure to minimize the discrepancy between the source and target distributions while inheriting robustness, adjustable with a single parameter α, as the prominent feature of this measure. Here, it is shown that the other well-known divergence-based UDA techniques can be derived as special cases of the proposed method. Furthermore, a theoretical upper bound is derived for the loss in the target domain in terms of the source loss and the initial α-divergence between the two domains. The robustness of the proposed method is validated through testing on several benchmarked datasets in open-set and partial UDA setups where extra classes existing in target and source datasets are considered as outliers.

A Prototype-Oriented Framework for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

2021

Existing methods for unsupervised domain adaptation often rely on minimizing some statistical distance between the source and target samples in the latent space. To avoid the sampling variability, class imbalance, and data-privacy concerns that often plague these methods, we instead provide a memory and computationefficient probabilistic framework to extract class prototypes and align the target features with them. We demonstrate the general applicability of our method on a wide range of scenarios, including single-source, multi-source, class-imbalance, and source-private domain adaptation. Requiring no additional model parameters and having a moderate increase in computation over the source model alone, the proposed method achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods.

A Survey of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Visual Recognition

ArXiv, 2021

While huge volumes of unlabeled data are generated and made available in many domains, the demand for automated understanding of visual data is higher than ever before. Most existing machine learning models typically rely on massive amounts of labeled training data to achieve high performance. Unfortunately, such a requirement cannot be met in real-world applications. The number of labels is limited and manually annotating data is expensive and time-consuming. It is often necessary to transfer knowledge from an existing labeled domain to a new domain. However, model performance degrades because of the differences between domains (domain shift or dataset bias). To overcome the burden of annotation, Domain Adaptation (DA) aims to mitigate the domain shift problem when transferring knowledge from one domain into another similar but different domain. Unsupervised DA (UDA) deals with a labeled source domain and an unlabeled target domain. The principal objective of UDA is to reduce the d...

Analysis of Representations for Domain Adaptation

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19, 2007

Discriminative learning methods for classification perform well when training and test data are drawn from the same distribution. In many situations, though, we have labeled training data for a source domain, and we wish to learn a classifier which performs well on a target domain with a different distribution. Under what conditions can we adapt a classifier trained on the source domain for use in the target domain? Intuitively, a good feature representation is a crucial factor in the success of domain adaptation. We formalize this intuition theoretically with a generalization bound for domain adaption. Our theory illustrates the tradeoffs inherent in designing a representation for domain adaptation and gives a new justification for a recently proposed model. It also points toward a promising new model for domain adaptation: one which explicitly minimizes the difference between the source and target domains, while at the same time maximizing the margin of the training set.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Domain Invariant Projection

2013 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, 2013

Domain-invariant representations are key to addressing the domain shift problem where the training and test examples follow different distributions. Existing techniques that have attempted to match the distributions of the source and target domains typically compare these distributions in the original feature space. This space, however, may not be directly suitable for such a comparison, since some of the features may have been distorted by the domain shift, or may be domain specific. In this paper, we introduce a Domain Invariant Projection approach: An unsupervised domain adaptation method that overcomes this issue by extracting the information that is invariant across the source and target domains. More specifically, we learn a projection of the data to a low-dimensional latent space where the distance between the empirical distributions of the source and target examples is minimized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the task of visual object recognition and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a standard domain adaptation benchmark dataset.

On-the-fly Domain Adaptation of Binary Classifiers

This work considers the on-the-fly domain adaptation of supervised binary classifiers, learned off-line, in order to adapt them to a target context. The probability density functions associated to negative and positive classes are supposed to be mixtures of the source distributions. Moreover, the mixture weights and the priors are only available at runtime. We present a theoretical solution to this problem, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on a real computer vision application. Our theoretical solution is applicable to any classifier approximating Bayes' classifier.