Minimizing Outputs’ Differences of Classifiers with Different Responsibilities for Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation

Adversarial discriminative domain adaptation (ADDA) is an efficient framework for unsupervised domain adaptation in image classification, where the source and target domains are assumed to have the same classes, but no labels are available for the target domain. While ADDA has already achieved better training efficiency and competitive accuracy on image classification in comparison to other adversarial based methods, we investigate whether we can improve its performance with a new framework and new loss formulations. Following the framework of semi-supervised GANs, we first extend the discriminator output over the source classes, in order to model the joint distribution over domain and task. We thus leverage on the distribution over the source encoder posteriors (which is fixed during adversarial training) and propose maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and reconstruction-based loss functions for aligning the target encoder distribution to the source domain. We compare and provide a comprehensive analysis of how our framework and loss formulations extend over simple multi-class extensions of ADDA and other discriminative variants of semi-supervised GANs. In addition, we introduce various forms of regularization for stabilizing training, including treating the discriminator as a denoising autoencoder and regularizing the target encoder with source examples to reduce overfitting under a contraction mapping (i.e., when the target per-class distributions are contracting during alignment with the source). Finally, we validate our framework on standard datasets like MNIST, USPS, SVHN, MNIST-M and Office-31. We additionally examine how the proposed framework benefits recognition problems based on sensing modalities that lack training data. This is realized by introducing and evaluating on a neuromorphic vision sensing (NVS) sign language recognition dataset, where the source domain constitutes emulated neuromorphic spike events converted from conventional pixel-based video and the target domain is experimental (real) spike events from an NVS camera. Our results on all datasets show that our proposal is both simple and efficient, as it competes or outperforms the state-of-the-art in unsupervised domain adaptation, such as DIFA and MCDDA, whilst offering lower complexity than other recent adversarial methods.

Unsupervised domain adaptation adapts classifiers to an un-labeled target domain by exploiting a labeled source domain. To reduce discrepancy between source and target domains, adversarial learning methods are typically selected to seek domain-invariant representations by confusing the domain discriminator. However, classifiers may not be well adapted to such a domain-invariant representation space, as the sample-level and class-level data structures could be distorted during adversarial learning. In this paper, we propose a novel Transferable Feature Learning approach on Graphs (TFLG) for unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation, which jointly incorporates sample-level and class-level structure information across two domains. TFLG first constructs graphs and identifies the class-wise correspondence across domains. A novel cross-domain graph convolutional operation is designed to jointly align the sample-level and class-level structures in two domains. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, compared to the representative unsupervised domain adaptation methods.

Domain consistency regularization for unsupervised multi-source domain adaptive classification

The prime challenge in unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) is to mitigate the domain shift between the source and target domains. Prior DA works show that pretext tasks could be used to mitigate this domain shift by learning domain invariant representations. However, in practice, we find that most existing pretext tasks are ineffective against other established techniques. Thus, we theoretically analyze how and when a subsidiary pretext task could be leveraged to assist the goal task of a given DA problem and develop objective subsidiary task suitability criteria. Based on this criteria, we devise a novel process of sticker intervention and cast sticker classification as a supervised subsidiary DA problem concurrent to the goal task unsupervised DA. Our approach not only improves goal task adaptation performance, but also facilitates privacy-oriented source-free DA i.e. without concurrent source-target access. Experiments on the standard Office-31, Office-Home, DomainNet, and VisDA benchmarks demonstrate our superiority for both single-source and multi-source source-free DA. Our approach also complements existing non-source-free works, achieving leading performance.

Unsupervised deep domain adaptation algorithm for video based human activity recognition via recurrent neural networks

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to learn domain-invariant features across domains to transfer knowledge from a well-labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Recently, some unsupervised domain adaptation methods focus on semantically aligning data distributions with pseudo-labels of the target domain. However, semantic alignment based on pseudo-labels has potential risks, e.g., inaccurate pseudo-labeling from classifier, and error accumulation from pseudo-label bias. To alleviate these risks, we propose a novel self-supervision based semantic alignment (S3A) approach for unsupervised domain adaptation, which can jointly incorporate the source alignment and cross-domain target alignment for better semantic alignment across domains. S3A consists of a two-stage semantic alignment procedure with self-supervision. One is to capture the discriminative structure of source domain by aligning source data to source class prototypes, and the other is to match each target data to its neighbor in source domain with self-supervision. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, compared with the representative adversarial learning and self-supervised learning based unsupervised domain adaptation methods.

Importance-weighted conditional adversarial network for unsupervised domain adaptation

Bionic limb control through myoelectric pattern recognition, offering intuitive decoding of motor intent, can improve the quality of life for individuals with amputations. However, most work on pattern recognition only uses a small subset of the myoelectric data generated during daily life, to train an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) via Supervised Learning (SL). Scenarios substantially different from the recording session e.g. different limb positions, can lead to misclassifications by the ANN during everyday usage of the bionic limb. Recording labeled data from all scenarios encountered in daily life could alleviate the problem, but would be prohibitively time consuming. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) offers a solution by leveraging unlabeled data from a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">target domain</i>, not represented in the labeled dataset i.e. the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">source domain</i>, to calibrate ANNs for improved performance. In this study we explore the potential of two UDA algorithms for domain shifts in myoelectric pattern recognition: Domain Adversarial Neural Networks (DANN) and Sliced Wasserstein Discrepancy (SWD). Offline evaluation identified SWD as the best-performing algorithm, which was subsequently validated in online experiments with 11 participants. Using UDA improved the performance on the target domain by 19% compared to an ANN trained through SL on data from the source domain only. Indeed, it nearly matched the performance of an ANN trained through SL on labeled data from both the source and target domain. This is the first time UDA was validated in online experiments as a viable approach to overcome domain shift problems caused by changes in limb position.

Unsupervised domain adaptive object detection aims to adapt a well-trained detector from its original source domain with rich labeled data to a new target domain with unlabeled data. Recently, mainstream approaches perform this task through adversarial learning, yet still suffer from two limitations. First, they mainly align marginal distribution by unsupervised cross-domain feature matching, and ignore each feature&#x0027;s categorical and positional information that can be exploited for conditional alignment; Second, they treat all classes as equally important for transferring cross-domain knowledge and ignore that different classes usually have different transferability. In this article, we propose a joint adaptive detection framework (JADF) to address the above challenges. First, an end-to-end joint adversarial adaptation framework for object detection is proposed, which aligns both marginal and conditional distributions between domains without introducing any extra hyper-parameter. Next, to consider the transferability of each object class, a metric for class-wise transferability assessment is proposed, which is incorporated into the JADF objective for domain adaptation. Further, an extended study from unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) to unsupervised few-shot domain adaptation (UFDA) is conducted, where only a few unlabeled training images are available in unlabeled target domain. Extensive experiments validate that JADF is effective in both the UDA and UFDA settings, achieving significant performance gains over existing state-of-the-art cross-domain detection methods.

Conventional machine learning relies on two presumptions: (1) the training and testing datasets follow the same independent distribution, and (2) an adequate quantity of samples is essential for achieving optimal model performance during training. Nevertheless, meeting these two assumptions can be challenging in real-world scenarios. Domain adaptation (DA) is a subfield of transfer learning that focuses on reducing the distribution difference between the source domain (Ds) and target domain (Dt) and subsequently applying the knowledge gained from the Ds task to the Dt task. The majority of current DA methods aim to achieve domain invariance by aligning the marginal probability distributions of the Ds. and Dt. Recent studies have pointed out that aligning marginal probability distributions alone is not sufficient and that alignment of conditional probability distributions is equally important for knowledge migration. Nonetheless, unsupervised DA presents a more significant difficulty in aligning the conditional probability distributions because of the unavailability of labels for the Dt. In response to this issue, there have been several proposed methods by researchers, including pseudo-labeling, which offer novel solutions to tackle the problem. In this paper, we systematically analyze various pseudo-labeling algorithms and their applications in unsupervised DA. First , we summarize the pseudo-label generation methods based on the single and multiple classifiers and actions taken to deal with the problem of imbalanced samples. Second, we investigate the application of pseudo-labeling in category feature alignment and improving feature discrimination. Finally, we point out the challenges and trends of pseudo-labeling algorithms. As far as we know, this article is the initial review of pseudo-labeling techniques for unsupervised DA.

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals convey abundant physiological and psychological information. Decoding EEG is fundamental for brain-computer interaction and medical rehabilitation. Nevertheless, the nonstationarity and inter-individual variability of EEG signals impedes current models from achieving robust crosssubject generalization without expensive subject-specific recalibration, thereby restricting practical deployment. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to improve generalization by minimizing distribution discrepancies between source and target domains. Recent studies regard different subjects as distinct domains and leverage UDA to facilitate cross-subject EEG classification by learning domain-invariant features through discrepancy minimization or adversarial training. However, these conventional methods are all developed in Euclidean space, which are insufficient to capture the non-linear structures inherent in EEG data. To address this limitation, we propose a Deep Adversarial Neural Network on the Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrix manifold, referred to as SPD-DANN, which facilitates the extraction of subject-invariant features through adversarial learning. Additionally, we design an SPD domain feature alignment loss and an SPD class prototype pair loss to simultaneously promote feature alignment across subjects and enhance feature space discriminability. Extensive experiments on four brain-computer interface (BCI) datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses several state-of-the-art UDA techniques. Furthermore, the proposed loss functions are readily adaptable to broader unsupervised or semi-supervised domain adaptation frameworks.

Sensors are devices that output signals for sensing physical phenomena and are widely used in all aspects of our social production activities. The continuous recording of physical parameters allows effective analysis of the operational status of the monitored system and prediction of unknown risks. Thanks to the development of deep learning, the ability to analyze temporal signals collected by sensors has been greatly improved. However, models trained in the source domain do not perform well in the target domain due to the presence of domain gaps. In recent years, many researchers have used deep unsupervised domain adaptation techniques to address the domain gap between signals collected by sensors in different scenarios, i.e., using labeled data in the source domain and unlabeled data in the target domain to improve the performance of models in the target domain. This survey first summarizes the background of recent research on unsupervised domain adaptation with time series sensor data, the types of sensors used, the domain gap between the source and target domains, and commonly used datasets. Then, the paper classifies and compares different unsupervised domain adaptation methods according to the way of adaptation and summarizes different adaptation settings based on the number of source and target domains. Finally, this survey discusses the challenges of the current research and provides an outlook on future work. This survey systematically reviews and summarizes recent research on unsupervised domain adaptation for time series sensor data to provide the reader with a systematic understanding of the field.

This work addresses the challenge of video violence detection in data-scarce scenarios, focusing on bridging the domain gap that often hinders the performance of deep learning models when applied to unseen domains. We present a novel unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) scheme designed to effectively mitigate this gap by combining supervised learning in the train (source) domain with unlabeled test (target) data. We employ single-image classification and multiple instance learning (MIL) to select frames with the highest classification scores, and, upon this, we exploit UDA techniques to adapt the model to unlabeled target domains. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation, using general-context data as the source domain and target domain datasets collected in specific environments, such as violent/non-violent actions in hockey matches and public transport. The results demonstrate that our UDA pipeline substantially enhances model performances, improving their generalization capabilities in novel scenarios without requiring additional labeled data.

With the rapid development of the remote sensing monitoring and computer vision technology, the deep learning method has made a great progress to achieve applications such as earth observation, climate change and even space exploration. However, the model trained on existing data cannot be directly used to handle the new remote sensing data, and labeling the new data is also time-consuming and labor-intensive. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is one of the solutions to the aforementioned problems of labeled data defined as the source domain and unlabeled data as the target domain, i.e., its essential purpose is to obtain a well-trained model and tackle the problem of data distribution discrepancy defined as the domain shift between the source and target domain. There are a lot of reviews that have elaborated on UDA methods based on natural data, but few of these studies take into consideration thorough remote sensing applications and contributions. Thus, in this paper, in order to explore the further progress and development of UDA methods in remote sensing, based on the analysis of the causes of domain shift, a comprehensive review is provided with a fine-grained taxonomy of UDA methods applied for remote sensing data, which includes Generative training, Adversarial training, Self-training and Hybrid training methods, to better assist scholars in understanding remote sensing data and further advance the development of methods. Moreover, remote sensing applications are introduced by a thorough dataset analysis. Meanwhile, we sort out definitions and methodology introductions of partial, open-set and multi-domain UDA, which are more pertinent to real-world remote sensing applications. We can draw the conclusion that UDA methods in the field of remote sensing data are carried out later than those applied in natural images, and due to the domain gap caused by appearance differences, most of methods focus on how to use generative training (GT) methods to improve the model’s performance. Finally, we describe the potential deficiencies and further in-depth insights of UDA in the field of remote sensing.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through high-order tensor matching with discriminative manifold learning