Remaining useful life prediction under variable operating conditions via multisource adversarial domain adaptation networks

Intelligent fault diagnosis (IFD) based on deep learning can achieve high accuracy from raw condition monitoring signals. However, models usually perform well on the training distribution only, and experience severe performance drops when applied to a different distribution. This is also observed in fault diagnosis, where assets are often operated in working conditions different from the ones in which the labeled data have been collected. The scenario where labeled data are available in a source domain and only unlabeled data are available in a target domain has been addressed recently by unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approaches for IFD. Recent methods have relied on self-training with confident pseudo-labels for the unlabeled target samples. However, the confidence-based selection of pseudo-labels is hindered by poorly calibrated uncertainty estimates in the target domain, primarily due to over-confident predictions, which limits the quality of pseudo-labels and leads to error accumulation. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Calibrated Adaptive Teacher (CAT), where we propose to calibrate the predictions of the teacher network on target samples throughout the self-training process, leveraging post hoc calibration techniques. We evaluate CAT on domain-adaptive IFD and perform extensive experiments on the Paderborn University (PU) benchmark for fault diagnosis of rolling bearings under varying operating conditions, using both time- and frequency-domain inputs. We compare four different calibration techniques within our framework, where temperature scaling is both the most effective and lightweight one. The resulting method—CAT+TempScaling—achieves state-of-the-art performance on most transfer tasks, with on average 7.5% higher accuracy and 4 times lower calibration error compared to domain-adversarial neural networks (DANNs) across the twelve PU transfer tasks.

Domain consistency regularization for unsupervised multi-source domain adaptive classification

The adversarial domain adaptation has made many achievements in the field of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA). However, initial adversarial domain adaptation methods do not consider the category-level domain adaptation, causing confusion between different categories in the different domains. This paper propose a UDA approach called Minimizing Outputs' Differences of Classifiers with Different Responsibilities (MODCDR) to improve this situation. Its framework consists of one generator and two different task-specific classifiers, one working on the source domain, while the other working on the target domain. By training the feature generator to minimize the outputs' discrepancy of these two classifiers, this method not only generates discriminative features, but also achieves the category-level feature distribution alignment simultaneously. In addition, these two classifiers can also produce and filter the reliable pseudo-labels on the target domain, being used for assisting our training. This paper tested this method on three publicly available transfer learning object recognition datasets, with comparison to recent unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation approaches. The results show that the proposed method has superior performance.

Transfer learning and domain adaptation (DA) methods have been utilized in bearing prognostic and health management, but most of the current DA methods do not take into account the feature scale change of degraded features when aligning the feature distribution, and these methods are more suitable for the classification problem, which is more robust to the feature scale change. However, they perform poorly in regression problems. In addition, most of the remaining useful life (RUL) prediction methods require preprocessing such as statistical feature extraction on the signal, which makes the prediction process complicated. To solve the above problems, a DA method based on the representation subspace distance (RSD) is proposed for predicting the bearing RUL under different operating conditions. First, the proposed convolutional neural network (CNN) self-attention (SA) long short term memory network model is utilized to extract the deep features from the original signal, which overcomes the limitations of the CNN in extracting time series. Then, the RSD in the Riemannian geometry of the Grassmann manifold is proposed as a domain transfer loss to learn domain invariant features. The modified method can align the feature distribution of the source domain and the target domain without changing the feature scale. At the same time, the bases mismatch penalization is introduced to avoid destroying the semantic information of the features in the process of domain alignment. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experiments on four types of transfer tasks, and its superiority is also demonstrated by comparison with other advanced methods.

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.

Multisource unsupervised domain adaptation (MUDA) is an important and challenging topic for target classification with the assistance of labeled data in source domains. When we have several labeled source domains, it is difficult to map all source domains and target domain into a common feature space for classifying the targets well. In this article, a new progressive multisource domain adaptation network (PMSDAN) is proposed to further improve the classification performance. PMSDAN mainly consists of two steps for distribution alignment. First, the multiple source domains are integrated as one auxiliary domain to match the distribution with the target domain. By doing this, we can generally reduce the distribution discrepancy between each source and target domains, as well as the discrepancy between different source domains. It can efficiently explore useful knowledge from the integrated source domain. Second, to mine assistance knowledge from each source domain as much as possible, the distribution of the target domain is separately aligned with that of each source domain. A weighted fusion method is employed to combine the multiple classification results for making the final decision. In the optimization of domain adaption, weighted hybrid maximum mean discrepancy (WHMMD) is proposed, and it considers both the interclass and intraclass discrepancies. The effectiveness of the proposed PMSDAN is demonstrated in the experiments comparing with some state-of-the-art methods.

A Two-Way alignment approach for unsupervised multi-Source domain adaptation

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.

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.

Dual contrastive universal adaptation network for multi-source visual recognition

In real-world hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, the limited annotated examples usually lead to the insufficiently trained classifier, which further generates low classification accuracy. To overcome this challenge, Domain Adaptation (DA) methods have been developed to transfer learnable knowledge from the external HSIs with sufficient labeled examples ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i.e</i> ., the source domain) to the interested HSI with scarce labeled examples ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i.e</i> ., the target domain). Conventional DA approaches often pseudo-label the examples with high classification confidence and then incorporate them in the training process. However, due to the significant domain gap, relying solely on the confident examples may not be adequate to achieve satisfactory performance. Therefore, this paper proposes an Interactive Easy-to-Hard Domain Adaptation method (IEH-DA) to arrange the adaptation process so that the “easy” examples are adapted ahead of the “hard” ones. In an early stage, the easy examples with high pseudo-labeling confidence are selected for the adversarial learning based DA. In a later stage, the “hard” examples with high informativity are further selected, and they are interactively labeled by human expert to provide accurate supervision information for adaptation. As a result, the examples in target domain are used in an easy-to-hard way, which forms a curriculum sequence for orderly model training. Extensive experiments conducted on typical public datasets demonstrate that IEH-DA outperforms other state-of-the-art DA methods for HSI classification.

An unsupervised domain adaptation approach for change detection and its application to deforestation mapping in tropical biomes

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

When deep neural networks are deployed in a highly automated vehicle for environment perception tasks in an unseen (target) domain that differs from the training (source) domain, the mismatch will result in decreased performance. Domain adaptation methods aim at overcoming this mismatch. Many recently investigated methods for unsupervised domain adaptation train a model using labeled source data and unlabeled target data at the same time. These methods assume that data from the target domain is available during the source domain training, which is not always the case in real applications. In this paper we present a way to perform an online style transfer for continual domain adaptation which improves performance on (multiple) unseen target domains using a given perception model. The approach is based on an image style transfer in the frequency domain and requires neither an adjustment of the given source-trained model parameters to the target domain, nor does it require any considerable amount of memory for storing its frequency domain representation of the source domain style, which is particularly important considering the hardware limitations in an autonomous vehicle.