Information Maximizing Adaptation Network With Label Distribution Priors for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation, which transfers knowledge from the source domain to the target domain, has still been a challenging problem. However, previous domain adaptation methods typically minimize the domain discrepancy by using the pseudo target labels. Since the pseudo labels can be noisy, which may cause misalignment and unsatisfying adaptation performance. To address the above challenges, we propose an information maximization adaptation network with label distribution priors. We revisit feature alignment in unsupervised domain adaptation from the perspective of distribution alignment, and find that learning discriminant feature representation requires to minimizing distribution discrepancy and maximizing source mutual information between the outputs of the classifier and feature representations. Due to domain shift, maximizing target mutual information may align features to incorrect class directly. We propose a weighted target mutual information by re-weighting the estimated mutual information via the mean prediction confidence in mini-batch, which can eliminate the negative impact of inaccurate estimation. In addition, we introduce a regularization term of label priors distribution to encourage the similarity to the real label distribution. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that our proposed method can achieve remarkable results compared with previous methods.

Automated summary

This paper proposes an information maximization adaptation network with label distribution priors to address the challenges brought by pseudo labels in unsupervised domain adaptation. By maximizing source mutual information, introducing weighted target mutual information, and adding a regularization term of label priors distribution, this method achieves remarkable results on three benchmark datasets.