Domain-Invariant Feature Learning for Domain Adaptation

Abstract

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) mainly explores how to learn domain-invariant features from the source domain when the target domain label is unknown. To learn domain-invariant features requires aligning the distribution of samples from two domains in the feature space, which can be achieved by minimizing the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) of samples from the two domains. However, there is still no effective way to find the best parameter values of MMD. Such a problem is addressed in the MMD with deep kernels (MMD-D), whose optimal parameters can be obtained through training. This study proposes a method of domain-invariant feature learning for UDA, whose architecture, named MMDDCDA, comprises an MMD-D module and a cross domain adaptation (CDA) module. MMDDCDA performs alternating training similar to adversarial training to alternately boost the power of the two modules. To our knowledge, this is the first UDA method that performs such alternating training on a UDA architecture using MMD with deep kernels. Experimental validation showed that the proposed method yields state-of-the-art results among UDA methods using other MMD variants and some UDA benchmarks.