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SubscribeGraphEcho: Graph-Driven Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Echocardiogram Video Segmentation
Echocardiogram video segmentation plays an important role in cardiac disease diagnosis. This paper studies the unsupervised domain adaption (UDA) for echocardiogram video segmentation, where the goal is to generalize the model trained on the source domain to other unlabelled target domains. Existing UDA segmentation methods are not suitable for this task because they do not model local information and the cyclical consistency of heartbeat. In this paper, we introduce a newly collected CardiacUDA dataset and a novel GraphEcho method for cardiac structure segmentation. Our GraphEcho comprises two innovative modules, the Spatial-wise Cross-domain Graph Matching (SCGM) and the Temporal Cycle Consistency (TCC) module, which utilize prior knowledge of echocardiogram videos, i.e., consistent cardiac structure across patients and centers and the heartbeat cyclical consistency, respectively. These two modules can better align global and local features from source and target domains, improving UDA segmentation results. Experimental results showed that our GraphEcho outperforms existing state-of-the-art UDA segmentation methods. Our collected dataset and code will be publicly released upon acceptance. This work will lay a new and solid cornerstone for cardiac structure segmentation from echocardiogram videos. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/GraphEcho
Domain Adaptation via Prompt Learning
Unsupervised domain adaption (UDA) aims to adapt models learned from a well-annotated source domain to a target domain, where only unlabeled samples are given. Current UDA approaches learn domain-invariant features by aligning source and target feature spaces. Such alignments are imposed by constraints such as statistical discrepancy minimization or adversarial training. However, these constraints could lead to the distortion of semantic feature structures and loss of class discriminability. In this paper, we introduce a novel prompt learning paradigm for UDA, named Domain Adaptation via Prompt Learning (DAPL). In contrast to prior works, our approach makes use of pre-trained vision-language models and optimizes only very few parameters. The main idea is to embed domain information into prompts, a form of representations generated from natural language, which is then used to perform classification. This domain information is shared only by images from the same domain, thereby dynamically adapting the classifier according to each domain. By adopting this paradigm, we show that our model not only outperforms previous methods on several cross-domain benchmarks but also is very efficient to train and easy to implement.
Online Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation in Ever-Changing Conditions
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims at reducing the domain gap between training and testing data and is, in most cases, carried out in offline manner. However, domain changes may occur continuously and unpredictably during deployment (e.g. sudden weather changes). In such conditions, deep neural networks witness dramatic drops in accuracy and offline adaptation may not be enough to contrast it. In this paper, we tackle Online Domain Adaptation (OnDA) for semantic segmentation. We design a pipeline that is robust to continuous domain shifts, either gradual or sudden, and we evaluate it in the case of rainy and foggy scenarios. Our experiments show that our framework can effectively adapt to new domains during deployment, while not being affected by catastrophic forgetting of the previous domains.
Adapting Off-the-Shelf Source Segmenter for Target Medical Image Segmentation
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled and unseen target domain, which is usually trained on data from both domains. Access to the source domain data at the adaptation stage, however, is often limited, due to data storage or privacy issues. To alleviate this, in this work, we target source free UDA for segmentation, and propose to adapt an ``off-the-shelf" segmentation model pre-trained in the source domain to the target domain, with an adaptive batch-wise normalization statistics adaptation framework. Specifically, the domain-specific low-order batch statistics, i.e., mean and variance, are gradually adapted with an exponential momentum decay scheme, while the consistency of domain shareable high-order batch statistics, i.e., scaling and shifting parameters, is explicitly enforced by our optimization objective. The transferability of each channel is adaptively measured first from which to balance the contribution of each channel. Moreover, the proposed source free UDA framework is orthogonal to unsupervised learning methods, e.g., self-entropy minimization, which can thus be simply added on top of our framework. Extensive experiments on the BraTS 2018 database show that our source free UDA framework outperformed existing source-relaxed UDA methods for the cross-subtype UDA segmentation task and yielded comparable results for the cross-modality UDA segmentation task, compared with a supervised UDA methods with the source data.
HRDA: Context-Aware High-Resolution Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to adapt a model trained on the source domain (e.g. synthetic data) to the target domain (e.g. real-world data) without requiring further annotations on the target domain. This work focuses on UDA for semantic segmentation as real-world pixel-wise annotations are particularly expensive to acquire. As UDA methods for semantic segmentation are usually GPU memory intensive, most previous methods operate only on downscaled images. We question this design as low-resolution predictions often fail to preserve fine details. The alternative of training with random crops of high-resolution images alleviates this problem but falls short in capturing long-range, domain-robust context information. Therefore, we propose HRDA, a multi-resolution training approach for UDA, that combines the strengths of small high-resolution crops to preserve fine segmentation details and large low-resolution crops to capture long-range context dependencies with a learned scale attention, while maintaining a manageable GPU memory footprint. HRDA enables adapting small objects and preserving fine segmentation details. It significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance by 5.5 mIoU for GTA-to-Cityscapes and 4.9 mIoU for Synthia-to-Cityscapes, resulting in unprecedented 73.8 and 65.8 mIoU, respectively. The implementation is available at https://github.com/lhoyer/HRDA.
Conditional Support Alignment for Domain Adaptation with Label Shift
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) refers to a domain adaptation framework in which a learning model is trained based on the labeled samples on the source domain and unlabelled ones in the target domain. The dominant existing methods in the field that rely on the classical covariate shift assumption to learn domain-invariant feature representation have yielded suboptimal performance under the label distribution shift between source and target domains. In this paper, we propose a novel conditional adversarial support alignment (CASA) whose aim is to minimize the conditional symmetric support divergence between the source's and target domain's feature representation distributions, aiming at a more helpful representation for the classification task. We also introduce a novel theoretical target risk bound, which justifies the merits of aligning the supports of conditional feature distributions compared to the existing marginal support alignment approach in the UDA settings. We then provide a complete training process for learning in which the objective optimization functions are precisely based on the proposed target risk bound. Our empirical results demonstrate that CASA outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on different UDA benchmark tasks under label shift conditions.
Can We Evaluate Domain Adaptation Models Without Target-Domain Labels? A Metric for Unsupervised Evaluation of Domain Adaptation
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) involves adapting a model trained on a label-rich source domain to an unlabeled target domain. However, in real-world scenarios, the absence of target-domain labels makes it challenging to evaluate the performance of deep models after UDA. Additionally, prevailing UDA methods typically rely on adversarial training and self-training, which could lead to model degeneration and negative transfer, further exacerbating the evaluation problem. In this paper, we propose a novel metric called the Transfer Score to address these issues. The transfer score enables the unsupervised evaluation of domain adaptation models by assessing the spatial uniformity of the classifier via model parameters, as well as the transferability and discriminability of the feature space. Based on unsupervised evaluation using our metric, we achieve three goals: (1) selecting the most suitable UDA method from a range of available options, (2) optimizing hyperparameters of UDA models to prevent model degeneration, and (3) identifying the epoch at which the adapted model performs optimally. Our work bridges the gap between UDA research and practical UDA evaluation, enabling a realistic assessment of UDA model performance. We validate the effectiveness of our metric through extensive empirical studies conducted on various public datasets. The results demonstrate the utility of the transfer score in evaluating UDA models and its potential to enhance the overall efficacy of UDA techniques.
Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation
Conventional unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) assumes that training data are sampled from a single domain. This neglects the more practical scenario where training data are collected from multiple sources, requiring multi-source domain adaptation. We make three major contributions towards addressing this problem. First, we collect and annotate by far the largest UDA dataset, called DomainNet, which contains six domains and about 0.6 million images distributed among 345 categories, addressing the gap in data availability for multi-source UDA research. Second, we propose a new deep learning approach, Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation M3SDA, which aims to transfer knowledge learned from multiple labeled source domains to an unlabeled target domain by dynamically aligning moments of their feature distributions. Third, we provide new theoretical insights specifically for moment matching approaches in both single and multiple source domain adaptation. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the power of our new dataset in benchmarking state-of-the-art multi-source domain adaptation methods, as well as the advantage of our proposed model. Dataset and Code are available at http://ai.bu.edu/M3SDA/.
MICDrop: Masking Image and Depth Features via Complementary Dropout for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is the task of bridging the domain gap between a labeled source domain, e.g., synthetic data, and an unlabeled target domain. We observe that current UDA methods show inferior results on fine structures and tend to oversegment objects with ambiguous appearance. To address these shortcomings, we propose to leverage geometric information, i.e., depth predictions, as depth discontinuities often coincide with segmentation boundaries. We show that naively incorporating depth into current UDA methods does not fully exploit the potential of this complementary information. To this end, we present MICDrop, which learns a joint feature representation by masking image encoder features while inversely masking depth encoder features. With this simple yet effective complementary masking strategy, we enforce the use of both modalities when learning the joint feature representation. To aid this process, we propose a feature fusion module to improve both global as well as local information sharing while being robust to errors in the depth predictions. We show that our method can be plugged into various recent UDA methods and consistently improve results across standard UDA benchmarks, obtaining new state-of-the-art performances.
Upcycling Models under Domain and Category Shift
Deep neural networks (DNNs) often perform poorly in the presence of domain shift and category shift. How to upcycle DNNs and adapt them to the target task remains an important open problem. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), especially recently proposed Source-free Domain Adaptation (SFDA), has become a promising technology to address this issue. Nevertheless, existing SFDA methods require that the source domain and target domain share the same label space, consequently being only applicable to the vanilla closed-set setting. In this paper, we take one step further and explore the Source-free Universal Domain Adaptation (SF-UniDA). The goal is to identify "known" data samples under both domain and category shift, and reject those "unknown" data samples (not present in source classes), with only the knowledge from standard pre-trained source model. To this end, we introduce an innovative global and local clustering learning technique (GLC). Specifically, we design a novel, adaptive one-vs-all global clustering algorithm to achieve the distinction across different target classes and introduce a local k-NN clustering strategy to alleviate negative transfer. We examine the superiority of our GLC on multiple benchmarks with different category shift scenarios, including partial-set, open-set, and open-partial-set DA. Remarkably, in the most challenging open-partial-set DA scenario, GLC outperforms UMAD by 14.8\% on the VisDA benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/GLC.
Boosting Novel Category Discovery Over Domains with Soft Contrastive Learning and All-in-One Classifier
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has proven to be highly effective in transferring knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a label-scarce target domain. However, the presence of additional novel categories in the target domain has led to the development of open-set domain adaptation (ODA) and universal domain adaptation (UNDA). Existing ODA and UNDA methods treat all novel categories as a single, unified unknown class and attempt to detect it during training. However, we found that domain variance can lead to more significant view-noise in unsupervised data augmentation, which affects the effectiveness of contrastive learning (CL) and causes the model to be overconfident in novel category discovery. To address these issues, a framework named Soft-contrastive All-in-one Network (SAN) is proposed for ODA and UNDA tasks. SAN includes a novel data-augmentation-based soft contrastive learning (SCL) loss to fine-tune the backbone for feature transfer and a more human-intuitive classifier to improve new class discovery capability. The SCL loss weakens the adverse effects of the data augmentation view-noise problem which is amplified in domain transfer tasks. The All-in-One (AIO) classifier overcomes the overconfidence problem of current mainstream closed-set and open-set classifiers. Visualization and ablation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed innovations. Furthermore, extensive experiment results on ODA and UNDA show that SAN outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
Taxonomy Adaptive Cross-Domain Adaptation in Medical Imaging via Optimization Trajectory Distillation
The success of automated medical image analysis depends on large-scale and expert-annotated training sets. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been raised as a promising approach to alleviate the burden of labeled data collection. However, they generally operate under the closed-set adaptation setting assuming an identical label set between the source and target domains, which is over-restrictive in clinical practice where new classes commonly exist across datasets due to taxonomic inconsistency. While several methods have been presented to tackle both domain shifts and incoherent label sets, none of them take into account the common characteristics of the two issues and consider the learning dynamics along network training. In this work, we propose optimization trajectory distillation, a unified approach to address the two technical challenges from a new perspective. It exploits the low-rank nature of gradient space and devises a dual-stream distillation algorithm to regularize the learning dynamics of insufficiently annotated domain and classes with the external guidance obtained from reliable sources. Our approach resolves the issue of inadequate navigation along network optimization, which is the major obstacle in the taxonomy adaptive cross-domain adaptation scenario. We evaluate the proposed method extensively on several tasks towards various endpoints with clinical and open-world significance. The results demonstrate its effectiveness and improvements over previous methods.
CoDA: Instructive Chain-of-Domain Adaptation with Severity-Aware Visual Prompt Tuning
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to adapt models from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains. When adapting to adverse scenes, existing UDA methods fail to perform well due to the lack of instructions, leading their models to overlook discrepancies within all adverse scenes. To tackle this, we propose CoDA which instructs models to distinguish, focus, and learn from these discrepancies at scene and image levels. Specifically, CoDA consists of a Chain-of-Domain (CoD) strategy and a Severity-Aware Visual Prompt Tuning (SAVPT) mechanism. CoD focuses on scene-level instructions to divide all adverse scenes into easy and hard scenes, guiding models to adapt from source to easy domains with easy scene images, and then to hard domains with hard scene images, thereby laying a solid foundation for whole adaptations. Building upon this foundation, we employ SAVPT to dive into more detailed image-level instructions to boost performance. SAVPT features a novel metric Severity that divides all adverse scene images into low-severity and high-severity images. Then Severity directs visual prompts and adapters, instructing models to concentrate on unified severity features instead of scene-specific features, without adding complexity to the model architecture. CoDA achieves SOTA performances on widely-used benchmarks under all adverse scenes. Notably, CoDA outperforms the existing ones by 4.6%, and 10.3% mIoU on the Foggy Driving, and Foggy Zurich benchmarks, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/Cuzyoung/CoDA
MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation
In unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), a model trained on source data (e.g. synthetic) is adapted to target data (e.g. real-world) without access to target annotation. Most previous UDA methods struggle with classes that have a similar visual appearance on the target domain as no ground truth is available to learn the slight appearance differences. To address this problem, we propose a Masked Image Consistency (MIC) module to enhance UDA by learning spatial context relations of the target domain as additional clues for robust visual recognition. MIC enforces the consistency between predictions of masked target images, where random patches are withheld, and pseudo-labels that are generated based on the complete image by an exponential moving average teacher. To minimize the consistency loss, the network has to learn to infer the predictions of the masked regions from their context. Due to its simple and universal concept, MIC can be integrated into various UDA methods across different visual recognition tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. MIC significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance across the different recognition tasks for synthetic-to-real, day-to-nighttime, and clear-to-adverse-weather UDA. For instance, MIC achieves an unprecedented UDA performance of 75.9 mIoU and 92.8% on GTA-to-Cityscapes and VisDA-2017, respectively, which corresponds to an improvement of +2.1 and +3.0 percent points over the previous state of the art. The implementation is available at https://github.com/lhoyer/MIC.
Focus on Your Target: A Dual Teacher-Student Framework for Domain-adaptive Semantic Segmentation
We study unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation. Currently, a popular UDA framework lies in self-training which endows the model with two-fold abilities: (i) learning reliable semantics from the labeled images in the source domain, and (ii) adapting to the target domain via generating pseudo labels on the unlabeled images. We find that, by decreasing/increasing the proportion of training samples from the target domain, the 'learning ability' is strengthened/weakened while the 'adapting ability' goes in the opposite direction, implying a conflict between these two abilities, especially for a single model. To alleviate the issue, we propose a novel dual teacher-student (DTS) framework and equip it with a bidirectional learning strategy. By increasing the proportion of target-domain data, the second teacher-student model learns to 'Focus on Your Target' while the first model is not affected. DTS is easily plugged into existing self-training approaches. In a standard UDA scenario (training on synthetic, labeled data and real, unlabeled data), DTS shows consistent gains over the baselines and sets new state-of-the-art results of 76.5\% and 75.1\% mIoUs on GTAvrightarrowCityscapes and SYNTHIArightarrowCityscapes, respectively.
Domain Adaptation for Time Series Under Feature and Label Shifts
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables the transfer of models trained on source domains to unlabeled target domains. However, transferring complex time series models presents challenges due to the dynamic temporal structure variations across domains. This leads to feature shifts in the time and frequency representations. Additionally, the label distributions of tasks in the source and target domains can differ significantly, posing difficulties in addressing label shifts and recognizing labels unique to the target domain. Effectively transferring complex time series models remains a formidable problem. We present Raincoat, the first model for both closed-set and universal domain adaptation on complex time series. Raincoat addresses feature and label shifts by considering both temporal and frequency features, aligning them across domains, and correcting for misalignments to facilitate the detection of private labels. Additionally, Raincoat improves transferability by identifying label shifts in target domains. Our experiments with 5 datasets and 13 state-of-the-art UDA methods demonstrate that Raincoat can improve transfer learning performance by up to 16.33% and can handle both closed-set and universal domain adaptation.
DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
As acquiring pixel-wise annotations of real-world images for semantic segmentation is a costly process, a model can instead be trained with more accessible synthetic data and adapted to real images without requiring their annotations. This process is studied in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Even though a large number of methods propose new adaptation strategies, they are mostly based on outdated network architectures. As the influence of recent network architectures has not been systematically studied, we first benchmark different network architectures for UDA and newly reveal the potential of Transformers for UDA semantic segmentation. Based on the findings, we propose a novel UDA method, DAFormer. The network architecture of DAFormer consists of a Transformer encoder and a multi-level context-aware feature fusion decoder. It is enabled by three simple but crucial training strategies to stabilize the training and to avoid overfitting to the source domain: While (1) Rare Class Sampling on the source domain improves the quality of the pseudo-labels by mitigating the confirmation bias of self-training toward common classes, (2) a Thing-Class ImageNet Feature Distance and (3) a learning rate warmup promote feature transfer from ImageNet pretraining. DAFormer represents a major advance in UDA. It improves the state of the art by 10.8 mIoU for GTA-to-Cityscapes and 5.4 mIoU for Synthia-to-Cityscapes and enables learning even difficult classes such as train, bus, and truck well. The implementation is available at https://github.com/lhoyer/DAFormer.
SKADA-Bench: Benchmarking Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Methods with Realistic Validation On Diverse Modalities
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (DA) consists of adapting a model trained on a labeled source domain to perform well on an unlabeled target domain with some data distribution shift. While many methods have been proposed in the literature, fair and realistic evaluation remains an open question, particularly due to methodological difficulties in selecting hyperparameters in the unsupervised setting. With SKADA-bench, we propose a framework to evaluate DA methods on diverse modalities, beyond computer vision task that have been largely explored in the literature. We present a complete and fair evaluation of existing shallow algorithms, including reweighting, mapping, and subspace alignment. Realistic hyperparameter selection is performed with nested cross-validation and various unsupervised model selection scores, on both simulated datasets with controlled shifts and real-world datasets across diverse modalities, such as images, text, biomedical, and tabular data. Our benchmark highlights the importance of realistic validation and provides practical guidance for real-life applications, with key insights into the choice and impact of model selection approaches. SKADA-bench is open-source, reproducible, and can be easily extended with novel DA methods, datasets, and model selection criteria without requiring re-evaluating competitors. SKADA-bench is available on Github at https://github.com/scikit-adaptation/skada-bench.
What is the Added Value of UDA in the VFM Era?
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) can improve a perception model's generalization to an unlabeled target domain starting from a labeled source domain. UDA using Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with synthetic source data can achieve generalization performance comparable to fully-supervised learning with real target data. However, because VFMs have strong generalization from their pre-training, more straightforward, source-only fine-tuning can also perform well on the target. As data scenarios used in academic research are not necessarily representative for real-world applications, it is currently unclear (a) how UDA behaves with more representative and diverse data and (b) if source-only fine-tuning of VFMs can perform equally well in these scenarios. Our research aims to close these gaps and, similar to previous studies, we focus on semantic segmentation as a representative perception task. We assess UDA for synth-to-real and real-to-real use cases with different source and target data combinations. We also investigate the effect of using a small amount of labeled target data in UDA. We clarify that while these scenarios are more realistic, they are not necessarily more challenging. Our results show that, when using stronger synthetic source data, UDA's improvement over source-only fine-tuning of VFMs reduces from +8 mIoU to +2 mIoU, and when using more diverse real source data, UDA has no added value. However, UDA generalization is always higher in all synthetic data scenarios than source-only fine-tuning and, when including only 1/16 of Cityscapes labels, synthetic UDA obtains the same state-of-the-art segmentation quality of 85 mIoU as a fully-supervised model using all labels. Considering the mixed results, we discuss how UDA can best support robust autonomous driving at scale.
Domain Adaptation and Entanglement: an Optimal Transport Perspective
Current machine learning systems are brittle in the face of distribution shifts (DS), where the target distribution that the system is tested on differs from the source distribution used to train the system. This problem of robustness to DS has been studied extensively in the field of domain adaptation. For deep neural networks, a popular framework for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is domain matching, in which algorithms try to align the marginal distributions in the feature or output space. The current theoretical understanding of these methods, however, is limited and existing theoretical results are not precise enough to characterize their performance in practice. In this paper, we derive new bounds based on optimal transport that analyze the UDA problem. Our new bounds include a term which we dub as entanglement, consisting of an expectation of Wasserstein distance between conditionals with respect to changing data distributions. Analysis of the entanglement term provides a novel perspective on the unoptimizable aspects of UDA. In various experiments with multiple models across several DS scenarios, we show that this term can be used to explain the varying performance of UDA algorithms.
Hard-aware Instance Adaptive Self-training for Unsupervised Cross-domain Semantic Segmentation
The divergence between labeled training data and unlabeled testing data is a significant challenge for recent deep learning models. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) attempts to solve such problem. Recent works show that self-training is a powerful approach to UDA. However, existing methods have difficulty in balancing the scalability and performance. In this paper, we propose a hard-aware instance adaptive self-training framework for UDA on the task of semantic segmentation. To effectively improve the quality and diversity of pseudo-labels, we develop a novel pseudo-label generation strategy with an instance adaptive selector. We further enrich the hard class pseudo-labels with inter-image information through a skillfully designed hard-aware pseudo-label augmentation. Besides, we propose the region-adaptive regularization to smooth the pseudo-label region and sharpen the non-pseudo-label region. For the non-pseudo-label region, consistency constraint is also constructed to introduce stronger supervision signals during model optimization. Our method is so concise and efficient that it is easy to be generalized to other UDA methods. Experiments on GTA5 to Cityscapes, SYNTHIA to Cityscapes, and Cityscapes to Oxford RobotCar demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Our codes are available at https://github.com/bupt-ai-cz/HIAST.
Connect, Not Collapse: Explaining Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
We consider unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where labeled data from a source domain (e.g., photographs) and unlabeled data from a target domain (e.g., sketches) are used to learn a classifier for the target domain. Conventional UDA methods (e.g., domain adversarial training) learn domain-invariant features to improve generalization to the target domain. In this paper, we show that contrastive pre-training, which learns features on unlabeled source and target data and then fine-tunes on labeled source data, is competitive with strong UDA methods. However, we find that contrastive pre-training does not learn domain-invariant features, diverging from conventional UDA intuitions. We show theoretically that contrastive pre-training can learn features that vary subtantially across domains but still generalize to the target domain, by disentangling domain and class information. Our results suggest that domain invariance is not necessary for UDA. We empirically validate our theory on benchmark vision datasets.
How Useful is Continued Pre-Training for Generative Unsupervised Domain Adaptation?
Recent breakthroughs in scale have enabled the emergence of powerful generative language models, and the ability to fine-tune these models on various tasks by casting them into prompts or instructions. In this landscape, the problem of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), or the problem of leveraging knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, has been left behind, with recent UDA methods still addressing discriminative classification. In particular, two popular UDA approaches, involving Continued Pre-Training (CPT) and learning domain invariant representations, have been under-explored in the generative setting, signaling a gap. In this work, we evaluate the utility of CPT for generative UDA. We first perform an empirical evaluation to measure the trade-offs between CPT and strong methods promoting domain invariance. We further evaluate how well the benefits of CPT extend to different architectures, tuning methods and data regimes. We then motivate the use of CPT by studying to what degree it benefits classification performance on the target domain. Finally, we attempt to understand the mechanism behind which CPT improves classification performance on the unlabeled target domain. Our findings suggest that a implicitly learns the downstream task while predicting masked words informative to that task. Our work connects the body of UDA research with that of instruction tuning, enabling an initial step towards a wider applicability of modern language models.
Secure Domain Adaptation with Multiple Sources
Multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation (MUDA) is a framework to address the challenge of annotated data scarcity in a target domain via transferring knowledge from multiple annotated source domains. When the source domains are distributed, data privacy and security can become significant concerns and protocols may limit data sharing, yet existing MUDA methods overlook these constraints. We develop an algorithm to address MUDA when source domain data cannot be shared with the target or across the source domains. Our method is based on aligning the distributions of source and target domains indirectly via estimating the source feature embeddings and predicting over a confidence based combination of domain specific model predictions. We provide theoretical analysis to support our approach and conduct empirical experiments to demonstrate that our algorithm is effective.
Source-free Domain Adaptation via Avatar Prototype Generation and Adaptation
We study a practical domain adaptation task, called source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) problem, in which we cannot access source domain data due to data privacy issues but only a pre-trained source model and unlabeled target data are available. This task, however, is very difficult due to one key challenge: the lack of source data and target domain labels makes model adaptation very challenging. To address this, we propose to mine the hidden knowledge in the source model and exploit it to generate source avatar prototypes (i.e., representative features for each source class) as well as target pseudo labels for domain alignment. To this end, we propose a Contrastive Prototype Generation and Adaptation (CPGA) method. Specifically, CPGA consists of two stages: (1) prototype generation: by exploring the classification boundary information of the source model, we train a prototype generator to generate avatar prototypes via contrastive learning. (2) prototype adaptation: based on the generated source prototypes and target pseudo labels, we develop a new robust contrastive prototype adaptation strategy to align each pseudo-labeled target data to the corresponding source prototypes. Extensive experiments on three UDA benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.
Similarity-Based Domain Adaptation with LLMs
Unsupervised domain adaptation leverages abundant labeled data from various source domains to generalize onto unlabeled target data. Prior research has primarily focused on learning domain-invariant features across the source and target domains. However, these methods often require training a model using source domain data, which is time-consuming and can limit model usage for applications with different source data. This paper introduces a simple framework that utilizes the impressive generalization capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for target data annotation without the need of source model training, followed by a novel similarity-based knowledge distillation loss. Our extensive experiments on cross-domain text classification reveal that our framework achieves impressive performance, specifically, 2.44\% accuracy improvement when compared to the SOTA method.
Target-agnostic Source-free Domain Adaptation for Regression Tasks
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) seeks to bridge the domain gap between the target and source using unlabeled target data. Source-free UDA removes the requirement for labeled source data at the target to preserve data privacy and storage. However, work on source-free UDA assumes knowledge of domain gap distribution, and hence is limited to either target-aware or classification task. To overcome it, we propose TASFAR, a novel target-agnostic source-free domain adaptation approach for regression tasks. Using prediction confidence, TASFAR estimates a label density map as the target label distribution, which is then used to calibrate the source model on the target domain. We have conducted extensive experiments on four regression tasks with various domain gaps, namely, pedestrian dead reckoning for different users, image-based people counting in different scenes, housing-price prediction at different districts, and taxi-trip duration prediction from different departure points. TASFAR is shown to substantially outperform the state-of-the-art source-free UDA approaches by averagely reducing 22% errors for the four tasks and achieve notably comparable accuracy as source-based UDA without using source data.
Rethinking Ensemble-Distillation for Semantic Segmentation Based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Recent researches on unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) have demonstrated that end-to-end ensemble learning frameworks serve as a compelling option for UDA tasks. Nevertheless, these end-to-end ensemble learning methods often lack flexibility as any modification to the ensemble requires retraining of their frameworks. To address this problem, we propose a flexible ensemble-distillation framework for performing semantic segmentation based UDA, allowing any arbitrary composition of the members in the ensemble while still maintaining its superior performance. To achieve such flexibility, our framework is designed to be robust against the output inconsistency and the performance variation of the members within the ensemble. To examine the effectiveness and the robustness of our method, we perform an extensive set of experiments on both GTA5 to Cityscapes and SYNTHIA to Cityscapes benchmarks to quantitatively inspect the improvements achievable by our method. We further provide detailed analyses to validate that our design choices are practical and beneficial. The experimental evidence validates that the proposed method indeed offer superior performance, robustness and flexibility in semantic segmentation based UDA tasks against contemporary baseline methods.
Few-shot Fine-tuning is All You Need for Source-free Domain Adaptation
Recently, source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) has emerged as a more practical and feasible approach compared to unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) which assumes that labeled source data are always accessible. However, significant limitations associated with SFUDA approaches are often overlooked, which limits their practicality in real-world applications. These limitations include a lack of principled ways to determine optimal hyperparameters and performance degradation when the unlabeled target data fail to meet certain requirements such as a closed-set and identical label distribution to the source data. All these limitations stem from the fact that SFUDA entirely relies on unlabeled target data. We empirically demonstrate the limitations of existing SFUDA methods in real-world scenarios including out-of-distribution and label distribution shifts in target data, and verify that none of these methods can be safely applied to real-world settings. Based on our experimental results, we claim that fine-tuning a source pretrained model with a few labeled data (e.g., 1- or 3-shot) is a practical and reliable solution to circumvent the limitations of SFUDA. Contrary to common belief, we find that carefully fine-tuned models do not suffer from overfitting even when trained with only a few labeled data, and also show little change in performance due to sampling bias. Our experimental results on various domain adaptation benchmarks demonstrate that the few-shot fine-tuning approach performs comparatively under the standard SFUDA settings, and outperforms comparison methods under realistic scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/daintlab/fewshot-SFDA .
Towards Identifiable Unsupervised Domain Translation: A Diversified Distribution Matching Approach
Unsupervised domain translation (UDT) aims to find functions that convert samples from one domain (e.g., sketches) to another domain (e.g., photos) without changing the high-level semantic meaning (also referred to as ``content''). The translation functions are often sought by probability distribution matching of the transformed source domain and target domain. CycleGAN stands as arguably the most representative approach among this line of work. However, it was noticed in the literature that CycleGAN and variants could fail to identify the desired translation functions and produce content-misaligned translations. This limitation arises due to the presence of multiple translation functions -- referred to as ``measure-preserving automorphism" (MPA) -- in the solution space of the learning criteria. Despite awareness of such identifiability issues, solutions have remained elusive. This study delves into the core identifiability inquiry and introduces an MPA elimination theory. Our analysis shows that MPA is unlikely to exist, if multiple pairs of diverse cross-domain conditional distributions are matched by the learning function. Our theory leads to a UDT learner using distribution matching over auxiliary variable-induced subsets of the domains -- other than over the entire data domains as in the classical approaches. The proposed framework is the first to rigorously establish translation identifiability under reasonable UDT settings, to our best knowledge. Experiments corroborate with our theoretical claims.
DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain Mixed Sampling
Semantic segmentation models based on convolutional neural networks have recently displayed remarkable performance for a multitude of applications. However, these models typically do not generalize well when applied on new domains, especially when going from synthetic to real data. In this paper we address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), which attempts to train on labelled data from one domain (source domain), and simultaneously learn from unlabelled data in the domain of interest (target domain). Existing methods have seen success by training on pseudo-labels for these unlabelled images. Multiple techniques have been proposed to mitigate low-quality pseudo-labels arising from the domain shift, with varying degrees of success. We propose DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain mixed Sampling, which mixes images from the two domains along with the corresponding labels and pseudo-labels. These mixed samples are then trained on, in addition to the labelled data itself. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution by achieving state-of-the-art results for GTA5 to Cityscapes, a common synthetic-to-real semantic segmentation benchmark for UDA.
SDC-UDA: Volumetric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Framework for Slice-Direction Continuous Cross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation
Recent advances in deep learning-based medical image segmentation studies achieve nearly human-level performance in fully supervised manner. However, acquiring pixel-level expert annotations is extremely expensive and laborious in medical imaging fields. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) can alleviate this problem, which makes it possible to use annotated data in one imaging modality to train a network that can successfully perform segmentation on target imaging modality with no labels. In this work, we propose SDC-UDA, a simple yet effective volumetric UDA framework for slice-direction continuous cross-modality medical image segmentation which combines intra- and inter-slice self-attentive image translation, uncertainty-constrained pseudo-label refinement, and volumetric self-training. Our method is distinguished from previous methods on UDA for medical image segmentation in that it can obtain continuous segmentation in the slice direction, thereby ensuring higher accuracy and potential in clinical practice. We validate SDC-UDA with multiple publicly available cross-modality medical image segmentation datasets and achieve state-of-the-art segmentation performance, not to mention the superior slice-direction continuity of prediction compared to previous studies.
BEV-DG: Cross-Modal Learning under Bird's-Eye View for Domain Generalization of 3D Semantic Segmentation
Cross-modal Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to exploit the complementarity of 2D-3D data to overcome the lack of annotation in a new domain. However, UDA methods rely on access to the target domain during training, meaning the trained model only works in a specific target domain. In light of this, we propose cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view for Domain Generalization (DG) of 3D semantic segmentation, called BEV-DG. DG is more challenging because the model cannot access the target domain during training, meaning it needs to rely on cross-modal learning to alleviate the domain gap. Since 3D semantic segmentation requires the classification of each point, existing cross-modal learning is directly conducted point-to-point, which is sensitive to the misalignment in projections between pixels and points. To this end, our approach aims to optimize domain-irrelevant representation modeling with the aid of cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view. We propose BEV-based Area-to-area Fusion (BAF) to conduct cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view, which has a higher fault tolerance for point-level misalignment. Furthermore, to model domain-irrelevant representations, we propose BEV-driven Domain Contrastive Learning (BDCL) with the help of cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view. We design three domain generalization settings based on three 3D datasets, and BEV-DG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art competitors with tremendous margins in all settings.
UDALM: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Language Modeling
In this work we explore Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) of pretrained language models for downstream tasks. We introduce UDALM, a fine-tuning procedure, using a mixed classification and Masked Language Model loss, that can adapt to the target domain distribution in a robust and sample efficient manner. Our experiments show that performance of models trained with the mixed loss scales with the amount of available target data and the mixed loss can be effectively used as a stopping criterion during UDA training. Furthermore, we discuss the relationship between A-distance and the target error and explore some limitations of the Domain Adversarial Training approach. Our method is evaluated on twelve domain pairs of the Amazon Reviews Sentiment dataset, yielding 91.74% accuracy, which is an 1.11% absolute improvement over the state-of-the-art.
Universal Domain Adaptation for Robust Handling of Distributional Shifts in NLP
When deploying machine learning systems to the wild, it is highly desirable for them to effectively leverage prior knowledge to the unfamiliar domain while also firing alarms to anomalous inputs. In order to address these requirements, Universal Domain Adaptation (UniDA) has emerged as a novel research area in computer vision, focusing on achieving both adaptation ability and robustness (i.e., the ability to detect out-of-distribution samples). While UniDA has led significant progress in computer vision, its application on language input still needs to be explored despite its feasibility. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for natural language that offers thorough viewpoints of the model's generalizability and robustness. Our benchmark encompasses multiple datasets with varying difficulty levels and characteristics, including temporal shifts and diverse domains. On top of our testbed, we validate existing UniDA methods from computer vision and state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques from NLP literature, yielding valuable findings: We observe that UniDA methods originally designed for image input can be effectively transferred to the natural language domain while also underscoring the effect of adaptation difficulty in determining the model's performance.
VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge
We present the 2017 Visual Domain Adaptation (VisDA) dataset and challenge, a large-scale testbed for unsupervised domain adaptation across visual domains. Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to solve the real-world problem of domain shift, where machine learning models trained on one domain must be transferred and adapted to a novel visual domain without additional supervision. The VisDA2017 challenge is focused on the simulation-to-reality shift and has two associated tasks: image classification and image segmentation. The goal in both tracks is to first train a model on simulated, synthetic data in the source domain and then adapt it to perform well on real image data in the unlabeled test domain. Our dataset is the largest one to date for cross-domain object classification, with over 280K images across 12 categories in the combined training, validation and testing domains. The image segmentation dataset is also large-scale with over 30K images across 18 categories in the three domains. We compare VisDA to existing cross-domain adaptation datasets and provide a baseline performance analysis using various domain adaptation models that are currently popular in the field.
Black-box Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Bi-directional Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory
Black-box unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) learns with source predictions of target data without accessing either source data or source models during training, and it has clear superiority in data privacy and flexibility in target network selection. However, the source predictions of target data are often noisy and training with them is prone to learning collapses. We propose BiMem, a bi-directional memorization mechanism that learns to remember useful and representative information to correct noisy pseudo labels on the fly, leading to robust black-box UDA that can generalize across different visual recognition tasks. BiMem constructs three types of memory, including sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory, which interact in a bi-directional manner for comprehensive and robust memorization of learnt features. It includes a forward memorization flow that identifies and stores useful features and a backward calibration flow that rectifies features' pseudo labels progressively. Extensive experiments show that BiMem achieves superior domain adaptation performance consistently across various visual recognition tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection.
Masked Feature Modeling Enhances Adaptive Segmentation
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation aims to transfer models from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. While auxiliary self-supervised tasks-particularly contrastive learning-have improved feature discriminability, masked modeling approaches remain underexplored in this setting, largely due to architectural incompatibility and misaligned optimization objectives. We propose Masked Feature Modeling (MFM), a novel auxiliary task that performs feature masking and reconstruction directly in the feature space. Unlike existing masked modeling methods that reconstruct low-level inputs or perceptual features (e.g., HOG or visual tokens), MFM aligns its learning target with the main segmentation task, ensuring compatibility with standard architectures like DeepLab and DAFormer without modifying the inference pipeline. To facilitate effective reconstruction, we introduce a lightweight auxiliary module, Rebuilder, which is trained jointly but discarded during inference, adding zero computational overhead at test time. Crucially, MFM leverages the segmentation decoder to classify the reconstructed features, tightly coupling the auxiliary objective with the pixel-wise prediction task to avoid interference with the primary task. Extensive experiments across various architectures and UDA benchmarks demonstrate that MFM consistently enhances segmentation performance, offering a simple, efficient, and generalizable strategy for unsupervised domain-adaptive semantic segmentation.
AFRDA: Attentive Feature Refinement for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
In Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation (UDA-SS), a model is trained on labeled source domain data (e.g., synthetic images) and adapted to an unlabeled target domain (e.g., real-world images) without access to target annotations. Existing UDA-SS methods often struggle to balance fine-grained local details with global contextual information, leading to segmentation errors in complex regions. To address this, we introduce the Adaptive Feature Refinement (AFR) module, which enhances segmentation accuracy by refining highresolution features using semantic priors from low-resolution logits. AFR also integrates high-frequency components, which capture fine-grained structures and provide crucial boundary information, improving object delineation. Additionally, AFR adaptively balances local and global information through uncertaintydriven attention, reducing misclassifications. Its lightweight design allows seamless integration into HRDA-based UDA methods, leading to state-of-the-art segmentation performance. Our approach improves existing UDA-SS methods by 1.05% mIoU on GTA V --> Cityscapes and 1.04% mIoU on Synthia-->Cityscapes. The implementation of our framework is available at: https://github.com/Masrur02/AFRDA
AdaMatch: A Unified Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning and Domain Adaptation
We extend semi-supervised learning to the problem of domain adaptation to learn significantly higher-accuracy models that train on one data distribution and test on a different one. With the goal of generality, we introduce AdaMatch, a method that unifies the tasks of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), semi-supervised learning (SSL), and semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA). In an extensive experimental study, we compare its behavior with respective state-of-the-art techniques from SSL, SSDA, and UDA on vision classification tasks. We find AdaMatch either matches or significantly exceeds the state-of-the-art in each case using the same hyper-parameters regardless of the dataset or task. For example, AdaMatch nearly doubles the accuracy compared to that of the prior state-of-the-art on the UDA task for DomainNet and even exceeds the accuracy of the prior state-of-the-art obtained with pre-training by 6.4% when AdaMatch is trained completely from scratch. Furthermore, by providing AdaMatch with just one labeled example per class from the target domain (i.e., the SSDA setting), we increase the target accuracy by an additional 6.1%, and with 5 labeled examples, by 13.6%.
Unified Language-driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation
This paper introduces Unified Language-driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation (ULDA), a novel task setting that enables a single model to adapt to diverse target domains without explicit domain-ID knowledge. We identify the constraints in the existing language-driven zero-shot domain adaptation task, particularly the requirement for domain IDs and domain-specific models, which may restrict flexibility and scalability. To overcome these issues, we propose a new framework for ULDA, consisting of Hierarchical Context Alignment (HCA), Domain Consistent Representation Learning (DCRL), and Text-Driven Rectifier (TDR). These components work synergistically to align simulated features with target text across multiple visual levels, retain semantic correlations between different regional representations, and rectify biases between simulated and real target visual features, respectively. Our extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that this framework achieves competitive performance in both settings, surpassing even the model that requires domain-ID, showcasing its superiority and generalization ability. The proposed method is not only effective but also maintains practicality and efficiency, as it does not introduce additional computational costs during inference. Our project page is https://senqiaoyang.com/project/ULDA .
Towards domain-invariant Self-Supervised Learning with Batch Styles Standardization
In Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), models are typically pretrained, fine-tuned, and evaluated on the same domains. However, they tend to perform poorly when evaluated on unseen domains, a challenge that Unsupervised Domain Generalization (UDG) seeks to address. Current UDG methods rely on domain labels, which are often challenging to collect, and domain-specific architectures that lack scalability when confronted with numerous domains, making the current methodology impractical and rigid. Inspired by contrastive-based UDG methods that mitigate spurious correlations by restricting comparisons to examples from the same domain, we hypothesize that eliminating style variability within a batch could provide a more convenient and flexible way to reduce spurious correlations without requiring domain labels. To verify this hypothesis, we introduce Batch Styles Standardization (BSS), a relatively simple yet powerful Fourier-based method to standardize the style of images in a batch specifically designed for integration with SSL methods to tackle UDG. Combining BSS with existing SSL methods offers serious advantages over prior UDG methods: (1) It eliminates the need for domain labels or domain-specific network components to enhance domain-invariance in SSL representations, and (2) offers flexibility as BSS can be seamlessly integrated with diverse contrastive-based but also non-contrastive-based SSL methods. Experiments on several UDG datasets demonstrate that it significantly improves downstream task performances on unseen domains, often outperforming or rivaling with UDG methods. Finally, this work clarifies the underlying mechanisms contributing to BSS's effectiveness in improving domain-invariance in SSL representations and performances on unseen domain.
Source-Free Domain Adaptation with Diffusion-Guided Source Data Generation
This paper introduces a novel approach to leverage the generalizability capability of Diffusion Models for Source-Free Domain Adaptation (DM-SFDA). Our proposed DM-SFDA method involves fine-tuning a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model to generate source domain images using features from the target images to guide the diffusion process. Specifically, the pre-trained diffusion model is fine-tuned to generate source samples that minimize entropy and maximize confidence for the pre-trained source model. We then apply established unsupervised domain adaptation techniques to align the generated source images with target domain data. We validate our approach through comprehensive experiments across a range of datasets, including Office-31, Office-Home, and VisDA. The results highlight significant improvements in SFDA performance, showcasing the potential of diffusion models in generating contextually relevant, domain-specific images.
On Balancing Bias and Variance in Unsupervised Multi-Source-Free Domain Adaptation
Due to privacy, storage, and other constraints, there is a growing need for unsupervised domain adaptation techniques in machine learning that do not require access to the data used to train a collection of source models. Existing methods for multi-source-free domain adaptation (MSFDA) typically train a target model using pseudo-labeled data produced by the source models, which focus on improving the pseudo-labeling techniques or proposing new training objectives. Instead, we aim to analyze the fundamental limits of MSFDA. In particular, we develop an information-theoretic bound on the generalization error of the resulting target model, which illustrates an inherent bias-variance trade-off. We then provide insights on how to balance this trade-off from three perspectives, including domain aggregation, selective pseudo-labeling, and joint feature alignment, which leads to the design of novel algorithms. Experiments on multiple datasets validate our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the state-of-art performance of the proposed algorithm, especially on some of the most challenging datasets, including Office-Home and DomainNet.
Pre-Training Transformers for Domain Adaptation
The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge 2021 called for unsupervised domain adaptation methods that could improve the performance of models by transferring the knowledge obtained from source datasets to out-of-distribution target datasets. In this paper, we utilize BeiT [1] and demonstrate its capability of capturing key attributes from source datasets and apply it to target datasets in a semi-supervised manner. Our method was able to outperform current state-of-the-art (SoTA) techniques and was able to achieve 1st place on the ViSDA Domain Adaptation Challenge with ACC of 56.29% and AUROC of 69.79%.
Active Learning for Domain Adaptation: An Energy-Based Approach
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of target data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at https://github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Large Language-Vision Models for Source-free Video Domain Adaptation
Source-Free Video Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SFVUDA) methods consists in the task of adapting an action recognition model, trained on a labelled source dataset, to an unlabelled target dataset, without accessing the actual source data. Previous approaches have attempted to address SFVUDA by leveraging self-supervision (e.g., enforcing temporal consistency) derived from the target data itself. In this work we take an orthogonal approach by exploiting "web-supervision" from Large Language-Vision Models (LLVMs), driven by the rationale that LLVMs contain rich world prior, which is surprisingly robust to domain-shift. We showcase the unreasonable effectiveness of integrating LLVMs for SFVUDA by devising an intuitive and parameter efficient method, which we name as Domain Adaptation with Large Language-Vision models (DALL-V), that distills the world prior and complementary source model information into a student network tailored for the target. Despite the simplicity, DALL-V achieves significant improvement over state-of-the-art SFVUDA methods.
AD-CLIP: Adapting Domains in Prompt Space Using CLIP
Although deep learning models have shown impressive performance on supervised learning tasks, they often struggle to generalize well when the training (source) and test (target) domains differ. Unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) has emerged as a popular solution to this problem. However, current DA techniques rely on visual backbones, which may lack semantic richness. Despite the potential of large-scale vision-language foundation models like CLIP, their effectiveness for DA has yet to be fully explored. To address this gap, we introduce AD-CLIP, a domain-agnostic prompt learning strategy for CLIP that aims to solve the DA problem in the prompt space. We leverage the frozen vision backbone of CLIP to extract both image style (domain) and content information, which we apply to learn prompt tokens. Our prompts are designed to be domain-invariant and class-generalizable, by conditioning prompt learning on image style and content features simultaneously. We use standard supervised contrastive learning in the source domain, while proposing an entropy minimization strategy to align domains in the embedding space given the target domain data. We also consider a scenario where only target domain samples are available during testing, without any source domain data, and propose a cross-domain style mapping network to hallucinate domain-agnostic tokens. Our extensive experiments on three benchmark DA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AD-CLIP compared to existing literature.
Confidence Score for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) aims to obtain high performance in the unlabeled target domain using the pre-trained source model, not the source data. Existing SFUDA methods assign the same importance to all target samples, which is vulnerable to incorrect pseudo-labels. To differentiate between sample importance, in this study, we propose a novel sample-wise confidence score, the Joint Model-Data Structure (JMDS) score for SFUDA. Unlike existing confidence scores that use only one of the source or target domain knowledge, the JMDS score uses both knowledge. We then propose a Confidence score Weighting Adaptation using the JMDS (CoWA-JMDS) framework for SFUDA. CoWA-JMDS consists of the JMDS scores as sample weights and weight Mixup that is our proposed variant of Mixup. Weight Mixup promotes the model make more use of the target domain knowledge. The experimental results show that the JMDS score outperforms the existing confidence scores. Moreover, CoWA-JMDS achieves state-of-the-art performance on various SFUDA scenarios: closed, open, and partial-set scenarios.
CLDA-YOLO: Visual Contrastive Learning Based Domain Adaptive YOLO Detector
Unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) algorithms can markedly enhance the performance of object detectors under conditions of domain shifts, thereby reducing the necessity for extensive labeling and retraining. Current domain adaptive object detection algorithms primarily cater to two-stage detectors, which tend to offer minimal improvements when directly applied to single-stage detectors such as YOLO. Intending to benefit the YOLO detector from UDA, we build a comprehensive domain adaptive architecture using a teacher-student cooperative system for the YOLO detector. In this process, we propose uncertainty learning to cope with pseudo-labeling generated by the teacher model with extreme uncertainty and leverage dynamic data augmentation to asymptotically adapt the teacher-student system to the environment. To address the inability of single-stage object detectors to align at multiple stages, we utilize a unified visual contrastive learning paradigm that aligns instance at backbone and head respectively, which steadily improves the robustness of the detectors in cross-domain tasks. In summary, we present an unsupervised domain adaptive YOLO detector based on visual contrastive learning (CLDA-YOLO), which achieves highly competitive results across multiple domain adaptive datasets without any reduction in inference speed.
SUG: Single-dataset Unified Generalization for 3D Point Cloud Classification
Although Domain Generalization (DG) problem has been fast-growing in the 2D image tasks, its exploration on 3D point cloud data is still insufficient and challenged by more complex and uncertain cross-domain variances with uneven inter-class modality distribution. In this paper, different from previous 2D DG works, we focus on the 3D DG problem and propose a Single-dataset Unified Generalization (SUG) framework that only leverages a single source dataset to alleviate the unforeseen domain differences faced by a well-trained source model. Specifically, we first design a Multi-grained Sub-domain Alignment (MSA) method, which can constrain the learned representations to be domain-agnostic and discriminative, by performing a multi-grained feature alignment process between the splitted sub-domains from the single source dataset. Then, a Sample-level Domain-aware Attention (SDA) strategy is presented, which can selectively enhance easy-to-adapt samples from different sub-domains according to the sample-level inter-domain distance to avoid the negative transfer. Experiments demonstrate that our SUG can boost the generalization ability for unseen target domains, even outperforming the existing unsupervised domain adaptation methods that have to access extensive target domain data. Our code is available at https://github.com/SiyuanHuang95/SUG.
CAD Models to Real-World Images: A Practical Approach to Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Industrial Object Classification
In this paper, we systematically analyze unsupervised domain adaptation pipelines for object classification in a challenging industrial setting. In contrast to standard natural object benchmarks existing in the field, our results highlight the most important design choices when only category-labeled CAD models are available but classification needs to be done with real-world images. Our domain adaptation pipeline achieves SoTA performance on the VisDA benchmark, but more importantly, drastically improves recognition performance on our new open industrial dataset comprised of 102 mechanical parts. We conclude with a set of guidelines that are relevant for practitioners needing to apply state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation in practice. Our code is available at https://github.com/dritter-bht/synthnet-transfer-learning.
Universal Domain Adaptation via Compressive Attention Matching
Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) aims to transfer knowledge from the source domain to the target domain without any prior knowledge about the label set. The challenge lies in how to determine whether the target samples belong to common categories. The mainstream methods make judgments based on the sample features, which overemphasizes global information while ignoring the most crucial local objects in the image, resulting in limited accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a Universal Attention Matching (UniAM) framework by exploiting the self-attention mechanism in vision transformer to capture the crucial object information. The proposed framework introduces a novel Compressive Attention Matching (CAM) approach to explore the core information by compressively representing attentions. Furthermore, CAM incorporates a residual-based measurement to determine the sample commonness. By utilizing the measurement, UniAM achieves domain-wise and category-wise Common Feature Alignment (CFA) and Target Class Separation (TCS). Notably, UniAM is the first method utilizing the attention in vision transformer directly to perform classification tasks. Extensive experiments show that UniAM outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on various benchmark datasets.
Complementary Domain Adaptation and Generalization for Unsupervised Continual Domain Shift Learning
Continual domain shift poses a significant challenge in real-world applications, particularly in situations where labeled data is not available for new domains. The challenge of acquiring knowledge in this problem setting is referred to as unsupervised continual domain shift learning. Existing methods for domain adaptation and generalization have limitations in addressing this issue, as they focus either on adapting to a specific domain or generalizing to unseen domains, but not both. In this paper, we propose Complementary Domain Adaptation and Generalization (CoDAG), a simple yet effective learning framework that combines domain adaptation and generalization in a complementary manner to achieve three major goals of unsupervised continual domain shift learning: adapting to a current domain, generalizing to unseen domains, and preventing forgetting of previously seen domains. Our approach is model-agnostic, meaning that it is compatible with any existing domain adaptation and generalization algorithms. We evaluate CoDAG on several benchmark datasets and demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in all datasets and evaluation metrics, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in handling unsupervised continual domain shift learning.
UniHDA: Towards Universal Hybrid Domain Adaptation of Image Generators
Generative domain adaptation has achieved remarkable progress, enabling us to adapt a pre-trained generator to a new target domain. However, existing methods simply adapt the generator to a single target domain and are limited to a single modality, either text-driven or image-driven. Moreover, they are prone to overfitting domain-specific attributes, which inevitably compromises cross-domain consistency. In this paper, we propose UniHDA, a unified and versatile framework for generative hybrid domain adaptation with multi-modal references from multiple domains. We use CLIP encoder to project multi-modal references into a unified embedding space and then linear interpolate the direction vectors from multiple target domains to achieve hybrid domain adaptation. To ensure the cross-domain consistency, we propose a novel cross-domain spatial structure (CSS) loss that maintains detailed spatial structure information between source and target generator. Experiments show that the adapted generator can synthesise realistic images with various attribute compositions. Additionally, our framework is versatile to multiple generators, \eg, StyleGAN2 and Diffusion Models.
Unsupervised domain adaptation for clinician pose estimation and instance segmentation in the operating room
The fine-grained localization of clinicians in the operating room (OR) is a key component to design the new generation of OR support systems. Computer vision models for person pixel-based segmentation and body-keypoints detection are needed to better understand the clinical activities and the spatial layout of the OR. This is challenging, not only because OR images are very different from traditional vision datasets, but also because data and annotations are hard to collect and generate in the OR due to privacy concerns. To address these concerns, we first study how joint person pose estimation and instance segmentation can be performed on low resolutions images with downsampling factors from 1x to 12x. Second, to address the domain shift and the lack of annotations, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method, called AdaptOR, to adapt a model from an in-the-wild labeled source domain to a statistically different unlabeled target domain. We propose to exploit explicit geometric constraints on the different augmentations of the unlabeled target domain image to generate accurate pseudo labels and use these pseudo labels to train the model on high- and low-resolution OR images in a self-training framework. Furthermore, we propose disentangled feature normalization to handle the statistically different source and target domain data. Extensive experimental results with detailed ablation studies on the two OR datasets MVOR+ and TUM-OR-test show the effectiveness of our approach against strongly constructed baselines, especially on the low-resolution privacy-preserving OR images. Finally, we show the generality of our method as a semi-supervised learning (SSL) method on the large-scale COCO dataset, where we achieve comparable results with as few as 1% of labeled supervision against a model trained with 100% labeled supervision.
Few-shot Hybrid Domain Adaptation of Image Generators
Can a pre-trained generator be adapted to the hybrid of multiple target domains and generate images with integrated attributes of them? In this work, we introduce a new task -- Few-shot Hybrid Domain Adaptation (HDA). Given a source generator and several target domains, HDA aims to acquire an adapted generator that preserves the integrated attributes of all target domains, without overriding the source domain's characteristics. Compared with Domain Adaptation (DA), HDA offers greater flexibility and versatility to adapt generators to more composite and expansive domains. Simultaneously, HDA also presents more challenges than DA as we have access only to images from individual target domains and lack authentic images from the hybrid domain. To address this issue, we introduce a discriminator-free framework that directly encodes different domains' images into well-separable subspaces. To achieve HDA, we propose a novel directional subspace loss comprised of a distance loss and a direction loss. Concretely, the distance loss blends the attributes of all target domains by reducing the distances from generated images to all target subspaces. The direction loss preserves the characteristics from the source domain by guiding the adaptation along the perpendicular to subspaces. Experiments show that our method can obtain numerous domain-specific attributes in a single adapted generator, which surpasses the baseline methods in semantic similarity, image fidelity, and cross-domain consistency.
Everything to the Synthetic: Diffusion-driven Test-time Adaptation via Synthetic-Domain Alignment
Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to enhance the performance of source-domain pretrained models when tested on unknown shifted target domains. Traditional TTA methods primarily adapt model weights based on target data streams, making model performance sensitive to the amount and order of target data. Recently, diffusion-driven TTA methods have demonstrated strong performance by using an unconditional diffusion model, which is also trained on the source domain to transform target data into synthetic data as a source domain projection. This allows the source model to make predictions without weight adaptation. In this paper, we argue that the domains of the source model and the synthetic data in diffusion-driven TTA methods are not aligned. To adapt the source model to the synthetic domain of the unconditional diffusion model, we introduce a Synthetic-Domain Alignment (SDA) framework to fine-tune the source model with synthetic data. Specifically, we first employ a conditional diffusion model to generate labeled samples, creating a synthetic dataset. Subsequently, we use the aforementioned unconditional diffusion model to add noise to and denoise each sample before fine-tuning. This process mitigates the potential domain gap between the conditional and unconditional models. Extensive experiments across various models and benchmarks demonstrate that SDA achieves superior domain alignment and consistently outperforms existing diffusion-driven TTA methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Diffusion-Driven-Test-Time-Adaptation-via-Synthetic-Domain-Alignment.
Transcending Domains through Text-to-Image Diffusion: A Source-Free Approach to Domain Adaptation
Domain Adaptation (DA) is a method for enhancing a model's performance on a target domain with inadequate annotated data by applying the information the model has acquired from a related source domain with sufficient labeled data. The escalating enforcement of data-privacy regulations like HIPAA, COPPA, FERPA, etc. have sparked a heightened interest in adapting models to novel domains while circumventing the need for direct access to the source data, a problem known as Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA). In this paper, we propose a novel framework for SFDA that generates source data using a text-to-image diffusion model trained on the target domain samples. Our method starts by training a text-to-image diffusion model on the labeled target domain samples, which is then fine-tuned using the pre-trained source model to generate samples close to the source data. Finally, we use Domain Adaptation techniques to align the artificially generated source data with the target domain data, resulting in significant performance improvements of the model on the target domain. Through extensive comparison against several baselines on the standard Office-31, Office-Home, and VisDA benchmarks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for the SFDA task.
TCSA-UDA: Text-Driven Cross-Semantic Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Medical Image Segmentation
Unsupervised domain adaptation for medical image segmentation remains a significant challenge due to substantial domain shifts across imaging modalities, such as CT and MRI. While recent vision-language representation learning methods have shown promise, their potential in UDA segmentation tasks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose TCSA-UDA, a Text-driven Cross-Semantic Alignment framework that leverages domain-invariant textual class descriptions to guide visual representation learning. Our approach introduces a vision-language covariance cosine loss to directly align image encoder features with inter-class textual semantic relations, encouraging semantically meaningful and modality-invariant feature representations. Additionally, we incorporate a prototype alignment module that aligns class-wise pixel-level feature distributions across domains using high-level semantic prototypes. This mitigates residual category-level discrepancies and enhances cross-modal consistency. Extensive experiments on challenging cross-modality cardiac, abdominal, and brain tumor segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our TCSA-UDA framework significantly reduces domain shift and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art UDA methods, establishing a new paradigm for integrating language-driven semantics into domain-adaptive medical image analysis.
Train Till You Drop: Towards Stable and Robust Source-free Unsupervised 3D Domain Adaptation
We tackle the challenging problem of source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) for 3D semantic segmentation. It amounts to performing domain adaptation on an unlabeled target domain without any access to source data; the available information is a model trained to achieve good performance on the source domain. A common issue with existing SFUDA approaches is that performance degrades after some training time, which is a by product of an under-constrained and ill-posed problem. We discuss two strategies to alleviate this issue. First, we propose a sensible way to regularize the learning problem. Second, we introduce a novel criterion based on agreement with a reference model. It is used (1) to stop the training when appropriate and (2) as validator to select hyperparameters without any knowledge on the target domain. Our contributions are easy to implement and readily amenable for all SFUDA methods, ensuring stable improvements over all baselines. We validate our findings on various 3D lidar settings, achieving state-of-the-art performance. The project repository (with code) is: github.com/valeoai/TTYD.
Back-Training excels Self-Training at Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Question Generation and Passage Retrieval
In this work, we introduce back-training, an alternative to self-training for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) from source to target domain. While self-training generates synthetic training data where natural inputs are aligned with noisy outputs, back-training results in natural outputs aligned with noisy inputs. This significantly reduces the gap between the target domain and synthetic data distribution, and reduces model overfitting to the source domain. We run UDA experiments on question generation and passage retrieval from the Natural Questions domain to machine learning and biomedical domains. We find that back-training vastly outperforms self-training by a mean improvement of 7.8 BLEU-4 points on generation, and 17.6\% top-20 retrieval accuracy across both domains. We further propose consistency filters to remove low-quality synthetic data before training. We also release a new domain-adaptation dataset- MLQuestions containing 35K unaligned questions, 50K unaligned passages, and 3K aligned question-passage pairs.
Learn from the Learnt: Source-Free Active Domain Adaptation via Contrastive Sampling and Visual Persistence
Domain Adaptation (DA) facilitates knowledge transfer from a source domain to a related target domain. This paper investigates a practical DA paradigm, namely Source data-Free Active Domain Adaptation (SFADA), where source data becomes inaccessible during adaptation, and a minimum amount of annotation budget is available in the target domain. Without referencing the source data, new challenges emerge in identifying the most informative target samples for labeling, establishing cross-domain alignment during adaptation, and ensuring continuous performance improvements through the iterative query-and-adaptation process. In response, we present learn from the learnt (LFTL), a novel paradigm for SFADA to leverage the learnt knowledge from the source pretrained model and actively iterated models without extra overhead. We propose Contrastive Active Sampling to learn from the hypotheses of the preceding model, thereby querying target samples that are both informative to the current model and persistently challenging throughout active learning. During adaptation, we learn from features of actively selected anchors obtained from previous intermediate models, so that the Visual Persistence-guided Adaptation can facilitate feature distribution alignment and active sample exploitation. Extensive experiments on three widely-used benchmarks show that our LFTL achieves state-of-the-art performance, superior computational efficiency and continuous improvements as the annotation budget increases. Our code is available at https://github.com/lyumengyao/lftl.
Contrastive Vicinal Space for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Recent unsupervised domain adaptation methods have utilized vicinal space between the source and target domains. However, the equilibrium collapse of labels, a problem where the source labels are dominant over the target labels in the predictions of vicinal instances, has never been addressed. In this paper, we propose an instance-wise minimax strategy that minimizes the entropy of high uncertainty instances in the vicinal space to tackle the stated problem. We divide the vicinal space into two subspaces through the solution of the minimax problem: contrastive space and consensus space. In the contrastive space, inter-domain discrepancy is mitigated by constraining instances to have contrastive views and labels, and the consensus space reduces the confusion between intra-domain categories. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated on public benchmarks, including Office-31, Office-Home, and VisDA-C, achieving state-of-the-art performances. We further show that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on PACS, which indicates that our instance-wise approach works well for multi-source domain adaptation as well. Code is available at https://github.com/NaJaeMin92/CoVi.
PADA: Example-based Prompt Learning for on-the-fly Adaptation to Unseen Domains
Natural Language Processing algorithms have made incredible progress, but they still struggle when applied to out-of-distribution examples. We address a challenging and underexplored version of this domain adaptation problem, where an algorithm is trained on several source domains, and then applied to examples from unseen domains that are unknown at training time. Particularly, no examples, labeled or unlabeled, or any other knowledge about the target domain are available to the algorithm at training time. We present PADA: An example-based autoregressive Prompt learning algorithm for on-the-fly Any-Domain Adaptation, based on the T5 language model. Given a test example, PADA first generates a unique prompt for it and then, conditioned on this prompt, labels the example with respect to the NLP prediction task. PADA is trained to generate a prompt which is a token sequence of unrestricted length, consisting of Domain Related Features (DRFs) that characterize each of the source domains. Intuitively, the generated prompt is a unique signature that maps the test example to a semantic space spanned by the source domains. In experiments with 3 tasks (text classification and sequence tagging), for a total of 14 multi-source adaptation scenarios, PADA substantially outperforms strong baselines.
Attentive WaveBlock: Complementarity-enhanced Mutual Networks for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Person Re-identification and Beyond
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for person re-identification is challenging because of the huge gap between the source and target domain. A typical self-training method is to use pseudo-labels generated by clustering algorithms to iteratively optimize the model on the target domain. However, a drawback to this is that noisy pseudo-labels generally cause trouble in learning. To address this problem, a mutual learning method by dual networks has been developed to produce reliable soft labels. However, as the two neural networks gradually converge, their complementarity is weakened and they likely become biased towards the same kind of noise. This paper proposes a novel light-weight module, the Attentive WaveBlock (AWB), which can be integrated into the dual networks of mutual learning to enhance the complementarity and further depress noise in the pseudo-labels. Specifically, we first introduce a parameter-free module, the WaveBlock, which creates a difference between features learned by two networks by waving blocks of feature maps differently. Then, an attention mechanism is leveraged to enlarge the difference created and discover more complementary features. Furthermore, two kinds of combination strategies, i.e. pre-attention and post-attention, are explored. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements on multiple UDA person re-identification tasks. We also prove the generality of the proposed method by applying it to vehicle re-identification and image classification tasks. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/WangWenhao0716/Attentive-WaveBlock.
Cluster-level pseudo-labelling for source-free cross-domain facial expression recognition
Automatically understanding emotions from visual data is a fundamental task for human behaviour understanding. While models devised for Facial Expression Recognition (FER) have demonstrated excellent performances on many datasets, they often suffer from severe performance degradation when trained and tested on different datasets due to domain shift. In addition, as face images are considered highly sensitive data, the accessibility to large-scale datasets for model training is often denied. In this work, we tackle the above-mentioned problems by proposing the first Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SFUDA) method for FER. Our method exploits self-supervised pretraining to learn good feature representations from the target data and proposes a novel and robust cluster-level pseudo-labelling strategy that accounts for in-cluster statistics. We validate the effectiveness of our method in four adaptation setups, proving that it consistently outperforms existing SFUDA methods when applied to FER, and is on par with methods addressing FER in the UDA setting.
Look at the Neighbor: Distortion-aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation
Endeavors have been recently made to transfer knowledge from the labeled pinhole image domain to the unlabeled panoramic image domain via Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA). The aim is to tackle the domain gaps caused by the style disparities and distortion problem from the non-uniformly distributed pixels of equirectangular projection (ERP). Previous works typically focus on transferring knowledge based on geometric priors with specially designed multi-branch network architectures. As a result, considerable computational costs are induced, and meanwhile, their generalization abilities are profoundly hindered by the variation of distortion among pixels. In this paper, we find that the pixels' neighborhood regions of the ERP indeed introduce less distortion. Intuitively, we propose a novel UDA framework that can effectively address the distortion problems for panoramic semantic segmentation. In comparison, our method is simpler, easier to implement, and more computationally efficient. Specifically, we propose distortion-aware attention (DA) capturing the neighboring pixel distribution without using any geometric constraints. Moreover, we propose a class-wise feature aggregation (CFA) module to iteratively update the feature representations with a memory bank. As such, the feature similarity between two domains can be consistently optimized. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance while remarkably reducing 80% parameters.
UPL-SFDA: Uncertainty-aware Pseudo Label Guided Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation
Domain Adaptation (DA) is important for deep learning-based medical image segmentation models to deal with testing images from a new target domain. As the source-domain data are usually unavailable when a trained model is deployed at a new center, Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) is appealing for data and annotation-efficient adaptation to the target domain. However, existing SFDA methods have a limited performance due to lack of sufficient supervision with source-domain images unavailable and target-domain images unlabeled. We propose a novel Uncertainty-aware Pseudo Label guided (UPL) SFDA method for medical image segmentation. Specifically, we propose Target Domain Growing (TDG) to enhance the diversity of predictions in the target domain by duplicating the pre-trained model's prediction head multiple times with perturbations. The different predictions in these duplicated heads are used to obtain pseudo labels for unlabeled target-domain images and their uncertainty to identify reliable pseudo labels. We also propose a Twice Forward pass Supervision (TFS) strategy that uses reliable pseudo labels obtained in one forward pass to supervise predictions in the next forward pass. The adaptation is further regularized by a mean prediction-based entropy minimization term that encourages confident and consistent results in different prediction heads. UPL-SFDA was validated with a multi-site heart MRI segmentation dataset, a cross-modality fetal brain segmentation dataset, and a 3D fetal tissue segmentation dataset. It improved the average Dice by 5.54, 5.01 and 6.89 percentage points for the three tasks compared with the baseline, respectively, and outperformed several state-of-the-art SFDA methods.
DoraCycle: Domain-Oriented Adaptation of Unified Generative Model in Multimodal Cycles
Adapting generative models to specific domains presents an effective solution for satisfying specialized requirements. However, adapting to some complex domains remains challenging, especially when these domains require substantial paired data to capture the targeted distributions. Since unpaired data from a single modality, such as vision or language, is more readily available, we utilize the bidirectional mappings between vision and language learned by the unified generative model to enable training on unpaired data for domain adaptation. Specifically, we propose DoraCycle, which integrates two multimodal cycles: text-to-image-to-text and image-to-text-to-image. The model is optimized through cross-entropy loss computed at the cycle endpoints, where both endpoints share the same modality. This facilitates self-evolution of the model without reliance on annotated text-image pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that for tasks independent of paired knowledge, such as stylization, DoraCycle can effectively adapt the unified model using only unpaired data. For tasks involving new paired knowledge, such as specific identities, a combination of a small set of paired image-text examples and larger-scale unpaired data is sufficient for effective domain-oriented adaptation. The code will be released at https://github.com/showlab/DoraCycle.
Meta-DMoE: Adapting to Domain Shift by Meta-Distillation from Mixture-of-Experts
In this paper, we tackle the problem of domain shift. Most existing methods perform training on multiple source domains using a single model, and the same trained model is used on all unseen target domains. Such solutions are sub-optimal as each target domain exhibits its own specialty, which is not adapted. Furthermore, expecting single-model training to learn extensive knowledge from multiple source domains is counterintuitive. The model is more biased toward learning only domain-invariant features and may result in negative knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a novel framework for unsupervised test-time adaptation, which is formulated as a knowledge distillation process to address domain shift. Specifically, we incorporate Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) as teachers, where each expert is separately trained on different source domains to maximize their specialty. Given a test-time target domain, a small set of unlabeled data is sampled to query the knowledge from MoE. As the source domains are correlated to the target domains, a transformer-based aggregator then combines the domain knowledge by examining the interconnection among them. The output is treated as a supervision signal to adapt a student prediction network toward the target domain. We further employ meta-learning to enforce the aggregator to distill positive knowledge and the student network to achieve fast adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art and validates the effectiveness of each proposed component. Our code is available at https://github.com/n3il666/Meta-DMoE.
ConDA: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for LiDAR Segmentation via Regularized Domain Concatenation
Transferring knowledge learned from the labeled source domain to the raw target domain for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is essential to the scalable deployment of autonomous driving systems. State-of-the-art methods in UDA often employ a key idea: utilizing joint supervision signals from both source and target domains for self-training. In this work, we improve and extend this aspect. We present ConDA, a concatenation-based domain adaptation framework for LiDAR segmentation that: 1) constructs an intermediate domain consisting of fine-grained interchange signals from both source and target domains without destabilizing the semantic coherency of objects and background around the ego-vehicle; and 2) utilizes the intermediate domain for self-training. To improve the network training on the source domain and self-training on the intermediate domain, we propose an anti-aliasing regularizer and an entropy aggregator to reduce the negative effect caused by the aliasing artifacts and noisy pseudo labels. Through extensive studies, we demonstrate that ConDA significantly outperforms prior arts in mitigating domain gaps.
Unsupervised Learning under Latent Label Shift
What sorts of structure might enable a learner to discover classes from unlabeled data? Traditional approaches rely on feature-space similarity and heroic assumptions on the data. In this paper, we introduce unsupervised learning under Latent Label Shift (LLS), where we have access to unlabeled data from multiple domains such that the label marginals p_d(y) can shift across domains but the class conditionals p(x|y) do not. This work instantiates a new principle for identifying classes: elements that shift together group together. For finite input spaces, we establish an isomorphism between LLS and topic modeling: inputs correspond to words, domains to documents, and labels to topics. Addressing continuous data, we prove that when each label's support contains a separable region, analogous to an anchor word, oracle access to p(d|x) suffices to identify p_d(y) and p_d(y|x) up to permutation. Thus motivated, we introduce a practical algorithm that leverages domain-discriminative models as follows: (i) push examples through domain discriminator p(d|x); (ii) discretize the data by clustering examples in p(d|x) space; (iii) perform non-negative matrix factorization on the discrete data; (iv) combine the recovered p(y|d) with the discriminator outputs p(d|x) to compute p_d(y|x) ; forall d. With semi-synthetic experiments, we show that our algorithm can leverage domain information to improve upon competitive unsupervised classification methods. We reveal a failure mode of standard unsupervised classification methods when feature-space similarity does not indicate true groupings, and show empirically that our method better handles this case. Our results establish a deep connection between distribution shift and topic modeling, opening promising lines for future work.
Augmenting and Aligning Snippets for Few-Shot Video Domain Adaptation
For video models to be transferred and applied seamlessly across video tasks in varied environments, Video Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (VUDA) has been introduced to improve the robustness and transferability of video models. However, current VUDA methods rely on a vast amount of high-quality unlabeled target data, which may not be available in real-world cases. We thus consider a more realistic Few-Shot Video-based Domain Adaptation (FSVDA) scenario where we adapt video models with only a few target video samples. While a few methods have touched upon Few-Shot Domain Adaptation (FSDA) in images and in FSVDA, they rely primarily on spatial augmentation for target domain expansion with alignment performed statistically at the instance level. However, videos contain more knowledge in terms of rich temporal and semantic information, which should be fully considered while augmenting target domains and performing alignment in FSVDA. We propose a novel SSA2lign to address FSVDA at the snippet level, where the target domain is expanded through a simple snippet-level augmentation followed by the attentive alignment of snippets both semantically and statistically, where semantic alignment of snippets is conducted through multiple perspectives. Empirical results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of SSA2lign across multiple cross-domain action recognition benchmarks.
Back to the Source: Diffusion-Driven Test-Time Adaptation
Test-time adaptation harnesses test inputs to improve the accuracy of a model trained on source data when tested on shifted target data. Existing methods update the source model by (re-)training on each target domain. While effective, re-training is sensitive to the amount and order of the data and the hyperparameters for optimization. We instead update the target data, by projecting all test inputs toward the source domain with a generative diffusion model. Our diffusion-driven adaptation method, DDA, shares its models for classification and generation across all domains. Both models are trained on the source domain, then fixed during testing. We augment diffusion with image guidance and self-ensembling to automatically decide how much to adapt. Input adaptation by DDA is more robust than prior model adaptation approaches across a variety of corruptions, architectures, and data regimes on the ImageNet-C benchmark. With its input-wise updates, DDA succeeds where model adaptation degrades on too little data in small batches, dependent data in non-uniform order, or mixed data with multiple corruptions.
Balancing Discriminability and Transferability for Source-Free Domain Adaptation
Conventional domain adaptation (DA) techniques aim to improve domain transferability by learning domain-invariant representations; while concurrently preserving the task-discriminability knowledge gathered from the labeled source data. However, the requirement of simultaneous access to labeled source and unlabeled target renders them unsuitable for the challenging source-free DA setting. The trivial solution of realizing an effective original to generic domain mapping improves transferability but degrades task discriminability. Upon analyzing the hurdles from both theoretical and empirical standpoints, we derive novel insights to show that a mixup between original and corresponding translated generic samples enhances the discriminability-transferability trade-off while duly respecting the privacy-oriented source-free setting. A simple but effective realization of the proposed insights on top of the existing source-free DA approaches yields state-of-the-art performance with faster convergence. Beyond single-source, we also outperform multi-source prior-arts across both classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks.
MV-Match: Multi-View Matching for Domain-Adaptive Identification of Plant Nutrient Deficiencies
An early, non-invasive, and on-site detection of nutrient deficiencies is critical to enable timely actions to prevent major losses of crops caused by lack of nutrients. While acquiring labeled data is very expensive, collecting images from multiple views of a crop is straightforward. Despite its relevance for practical applications, unsupervised domain adaptation where multiple views are available for the labeled source domain as well as the unlabeled target domain is an unexplored research area. In this work, we thus propose an approach that leverages multiple camera views in the source and target domain for unsupervised domain adaptation. We evaluate the proposed approach on two nutrient deficiency datasets. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on both datasets compared to other unsupervised domain adaptation methods. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/jh-yi/MV-Match.
In Search for a Generalizable Method for Source Free Domain Adaptation
Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) is compelling because it allows adapting an off-the-shelf model to a new domain using only unlabelled data. In this work, we apply existing SFDA techniques to a challenging set of naturally-occurring distribution shifts in bioacoustics, which are very different from the ones commonly studied in computer vision. We find existing methods perform differently relative to each other than observed in vision benchmarks, and sometimes perform worse than no adaptation at all. We propose a new simple method which outperforms the existing methods on our new shifts while exhibiting strong performance on a range of vision datasets. Our findings suggest that existing SFDA methods are not as generalizable as previously thought and that considering diverse modalities can be a useful avenue for designing more robust models.
SelectNAdapt: Support Set Selection for Few-Shot Domain Adaptation
Generalisation of deep neural networks becomes vulnerable when distribution shifts are encountered between train (source) and test (target) domain data. Few-shot domain adaptation mitigates this issue by adapting deep neural networks pre-trained on the source domain to the target domain using a randomly selected and annotated support set from the target domain. This paper argues that randomly selecting the support set can be further improved for effectively adapting the pre-trained source models to the target domain. Alternatively, we propose SelectNAdapt, an algorithm to curate the selection of the target domain samples, which are then annotated and included in the support set. In particular, for the K-shot adaptation problem, we first leverage self-supervision to learn features of the target domain data. Then, we propose a per-class clustering scheme of the learned target domain features and select K representative target samples using a distance-based scoring function. Finally, we bring our selection setup towards a practical ground by relying on pseudo-labels for clustering semantically similar target domain samples. Our experiments show promising results on three few-shot domain adaptation benchmarks for image recognition compared to related approaches and the standard random selection.
Unsupervised Expressive Rules Provide Explainability and Assist Human Experts Grasping New Domains
Approaching new data can be quite deterrent; you do not know how your categories of interest are realized in it, commonly, there is no labeled data at hand, and the performance of domain adaptation methods is unsatisfactory. Aiming to assist domain experts in their first steps into a new task over a new corpus, we present an unsupervised approach to reveal complex rules which cluster the unexplored corpus by its prominent categories (or facets). These rules are human-readable, thus providing an important ingredient which has become in short supply lately - explainability. Each rule provides an explanation for the commonality of all the texts it clusters together. We present an extensive evaluation of the usefulness of these rules in identifying target categories, as well as a user study which assesses their interpretability.
Contrastive Model Adaptation for Cross-Condition Robustness in Semantic Segmentation
Standard unsupervised domain adaptation methods adapt models from a source to a target domain using labeled source data and unlabeled target data jointly. In model adaptation, on the other hand, access to the labeled source data is prohibited, i.e., only the source-trained model and unlabeled target data are available. We investigate normal-to-adverse condition model adaptation for semantic segmentation, whereby image-level correspondences are available in the target domain. The target set consists of unlabeled pairs of adverse- and normal-condition street images taken at GPS-matched locations. Our method -- CMA -- leverages such image pairs to learn condition-invariant features via contrastive learning. In particular, CMA encourages features in the embedding space to be grouped according to their condition-invariant semantic content and not according to the condition under which respective inputs are captured. To obtain accurate cross-domain semantic correspondences, we warp the normal image to the viewpoint of the adverse image and leverage warp-confidence scores to create robust, aggregated features. With this approach, we achieve state-of-the-art semantic segmentation performance for model adaptation on several normal-to-adverse adaptation benchmarks, such as ACDC and Dark Zurich. We also evaluate CMA on a newly procured adverse-condition generalization benchmark and report favorable results compared to standard unsupervised domain adaptation methods, despite the comparative handicap of CMA due to source data inaccessibility. Code is available at https://github.com/brdav/cma.
Memory-Assisted Sub-Prototype Mining for Universal Domain Adaptation
Universal domain adaptation aims to align the classes and reduce the feature gap between the same category of the source and target domains. The target private category is set as the unknown class during the adaptation process, as it is not included in the source domain. However, most existing methods overlook the intra-class structure within a category, especially in cases where there exists significant concept shift between the samples belonging to the same category. When samples with large concept shift are forced to be pushed together, it may negatively affect the adaptation performance. Moreover, from the interpretability aspect, it is unreasonable to align visual features with significant differences, such as fighter jets and civil aircraft, into the same category. Unfortunately, due to such semantic ambiguity and annotation cost, categories are not always classified in detail, making it difficult for the model to perform precise adaptation. To address these issues, we propose a novel Memory-Assisted Sub-Prototype Mining (MemSPM) method that can learn the differences between samples belonging to the same category and mine sub-classes when there exists significant concept shift between them. By doing so, our model learns a more reasonable feature space that enhances the transferability and reflects the inherent differences among samples annotated as the same category. We evaluate the effectiveness of our MemSPM method over multiple scenarios, including UniDA, OSDA, and PDA. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmarks in most cases.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Global and Local Graph Neural Networks in Limited Labeled Data Scenario: Application to Disaster Management
Identification and categorization of social media posts generated during disasters are crucial to reduce the sufferings of the affected people. However, lack of labeled data is a significant bottleneck in learning an effective categorization system for a disaster. This motivates us to study the problem as unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) between a previous disaster with labeled data (source) and a current disaster (target). However, if the amount of labeled data available is limited, it restricts the learning capabilities of the model. To handle this challenge, we utilize limited labeled data along with abundantly available unlabeled data, generated during a source disaster to propose a novel two-part graph neural network. The first-part extracts domain-agnostic global information by constructing a token level graph across domains and the second-part preserves local instance-level semantics. In our experiments, we show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques by 2.74% weighted F_1 score on average on two standard public dataset in the area of disaster management. We also report experimental results for granular actionable multi-label classification datasets in disaster domain for the first time, on which we outperform BERT by 3.00% on average w.r.t weighted F_1. Additionally, we show that our approach can retain performance when very limited labeled data is available.
Rethinking the Role of Pre-Trained Networks in Source-Free Domain Adaptation
Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a source model trained on a fully-labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Large-data pre-trained networks are used to initialize source models during source training, and subsequently discarded. However, source training can cause the model to overfit to source data distribution and lose applicable target domain knowledge. We propose to integrate the pre-trained network into the target adaptation process as it has diversified features important for generalization and provides an alternate view of features and classification decisions different from the source model. We propose to distil useful target domain information through a co-learning strategy to improve target pseudolabel quality for finetuning the source model. Evaluation on 4 benchmark datasets show that our proposed strategy improves adaptation performance and can be successfully integrated with existing SFDA methods. Leveraging modern pre-trained networks that have stronger representation learning ability in the co-learning strategy further boosts performance.
OSSA: Unsupervised One-Shot Style Adaptation
Despite their success in various vision tasks, deep neural network architectures often underperform in out-of-distribution scenarios due to the difference between training and target domain style. To address this limitation, we introduce One-Shot Style Adaptation (OSSA), a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method for object detection that utilizes a single, unlabeled target image to approximate the target domain style. Specifically, OSSA generates diverse target styles by perturbing the style statistics derived from a single target image and then applies these styles to a labeled source dataset at the feature level using Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN). Extensive experiments show that OSSA establishes a new state-of-the-art among one-shot domain adaptation methods by a significant margin, and in some cases, even outperforms strong baselines that use thousands of unlabeled target images. By applying OSSA in various scenarios, including weather, simulated-to-real (sim2real), and visual-to-thermal adaptations, our study explores the overarching significance of the style gap in these contexts. OSSA's simplicity and efficiency allow easy integration into existing frameworks, providing a potentially viable solution for practical applications with limited data availability. Code is available at https://github.com/RobinGerster7/OSSA
ViLAaD: Enhancing "Attracting and Dispersing'' Source-Free Domain Adaptation with Vision-and-Language Model
Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a pre-trained source model to a target dataset from a different domain without access to the source data. Conventional SFDA methods are limited by the information encoded in the pre-trained source model and the unlabeled target data. Recently, approaches leveraging auxiliary resources have emerged, yet remain in their early stages, offering ample opportunities for research. In this work, we propose a novel method that incorporates auxiliary information by extending an existing SFDA framework using Vision-and-Language (ViL) models. Specifically, we build upon Attracting and Dispersing (AaD), a widely adopted SFDA technique, and generalize its core principle to naturally integrate ViL models as a powerful initialization for target adaptation. Our approach, called ViL-enhanced AaD (ViLAaD), preserves the simplicity and flexibility of the AaD framework, while leveraging ViL models to significantly boost adaptation performance. We validate our method through experiments using various ViL models, demonstrating that ViLAaD consistently outperforms both AaD and zero-shot classification by ViL models, especially when both the source model and ViL model provide strong initializations. Moreover, the flexibility of ViLAaD allows it to be seamlessly incorporated into an alternating optimization framework with ViL prompt tuning and extended with additional objectives for target model adaptation. Extensive experiments on four SFDA benchmarks show that this enhanced version, ViLAaD++, achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple SFDA scenarios, including Closed-set SFDA, Partial-set SFDA, and Open-set SFDA.
Contrast and Mix: Temporal Contrastive Video Domain Adaptation with Background Mixing
Unsupervised domain adaptation which aims to adapt models trained on a labeled source domain to a completely unlabeled target domain has attracted much attention in recent years. While many domain adaptation techniques have been proposed for images, the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation in videos remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we introduce Contrast and Mix (CoMix), a new contrastive learning framework that aims to learn discriminative invariant feature representations for unsupervised video domain adaptation. First, unlike existing methods that rely on adversarial learning for feature alignment, we utilize temporal contrastive learning to bridge the domain gap by maximizing the similarity between encoded representations of an unlabeled video at two different speeds as well as minimizing the similarity between different videos played at different speeds. Second, we propose a novel extension to the temporal contrastive loss by using background mixing that allows additional positives per anchor, thus adapting contrastive learning to leverage action semantics shared across both domains. Moreover, we also integrate a supervised contrastive learning objective using target pseudo-labels to enhance discriminability of the latent space for video domain adaptation. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://cvir.github.io/projects/comix
LanDA: Language-Guided Multi-Source Domain Adaptation
Multi-Source Domain Adaptation (MSDA) aims to mitigate changes in data distribution when transferring knowledge from multiple labeled source domains to an unlabeled target domain. However, existing MSDA techniques assume target domain images are available, yet overlook image-rich semantic information. Consequently, an open question is whether MSDA can be guided solely by textual cues in the absence of target domain images. By employing a multimodal model with a joint image and language embedding space, we propose a novel language-guided MSDA approach, termed LanDA, based on optimal transfer theory, which facilitates the transfer of multiple source domains to a new target domain, requiring only a textual description of the target domain without needing even a single target domain image, while retaining task-relevant information. We present extensive experiments across different transfer scenarios using a suite of relevant benchmarks, demonstrating that LanDA outperforms standard fine-tuning and ensemble approaches in both target and source domains.
Shuffle PatchMix Augmentation with Confidence-Margin Weighted Pseudo-Labels for Enhanced Source-Free Domain Adaptation
This work investigates Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA), where a model adapts to a target domain without access to source data. A new augmentation technique, Shuffle PatchMix (SPM), and a novel reweighting strategy are introduced to enhance performance. SPM shuffles and blends image patches to generate diverse and challenging augmentations, while the reweighting strategy prioritizes reliable pseudo-labels to mitigate label noise. These techniques are particularly effective on smaller datasets like PACS, where overfitting and pseudo-label noise pose greater risks. State-of-the-art results are achieved on three major benchmarks: PACS, VisDA-C, and DomainNet-126. Notably, on PACS, improvements of 7.3% (79.4% to 86.7%) and 7.2% are observed in single-target and multi-target settings, respectively, while gains of 2.8% and 0.7% are attained on DomainNet-126 and VisDA-C. This combination of advanced augmentation and robust pseudo-label reweighting establishes a new benchmark for SFDA. The code is available at: https://github.com/PrasannaPulakurthi/SPM
HyDA: Hypernetworks for Test Time Domain Adaptation in Medical Imaging Analysis
Medical imaging datasets often vary due to differences in acquisition protocols, patient demographics, and imaging devices. These variations in data distribution, known as domain shift, present a significant challenge in adapting imaging analysis models for practical healthcare applications. Most current domain adaptation (DA) approaches aim either to align the distributions between the source and target domains or to learn an invariant feature space that generalizes well across all domains. However, both strategies require access to a sufficient number of examples, though not necessarily annotated, from the test domain during training. This limitation hinders the widespread deployment of models in clinical settings, where target domain data may only be accessible in real time. In this work, we introduce HyDA, a novel hypernetwork framework that leverages domain characteristics rather than suppressing them, enabling dynamic adaptation at inference time. Specifically, HyDA learns implicit domain representations and uses them to adjust model parameters on-the-fly, effectively interpolating to unseen domains. We validate HyDA on two clinically relevant applications - MRI brain age prediction and chest X-ray pathology classification - demonstrating its ability to generalize across tasks and modalities. Our code is available at TBD.
Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters: Decoupling and Injecting Domain Knowledge to Pre-trained Language Models Memories
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) demonstrate excellent abilities to understand texts in the generic domain while struggling in a specific domain. Although continued pre-training on a large domain-specific corpus is effective, it is costly to tune all the parameters on the domain. In this paper, we investigate whether we can adapt PLMs both effectively and efficiently by only tuning a few parameters. Specifically, we decouple the feed-forward networks (FFNs) of the Transformer architecture into two parts: the original pre-trained FFNs to maintain the old-domain knowledge and our novel domain-specific adapters to inject domain-specific knowledge in parallel. Then we adopt a mixture-of-adapters gate to fuse the knowledge from different domain adapters dynamically. Our proposed Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters (MixDA) employs a two-stage adapter-tuning strategy that leverages both unlabeled data and labeled data to help the domain adaptation: i) domain-specific adapter on unlabeled data; followed by ii) the task-specific adapter on labeled data. MixDA can be seamlessly plugged into the pretraining-finetuning paradigm and our experiments demonstrate that MixDA achieves superior performance on in-domain tasks (GLUE), out-of-domain tasks (ChemProt, RCT, IMDB, Amazon), and knowledge-intensive tasks (KILT). Further analyses demonstrate the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/Amano-Aki/Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters.
SF(DA)^2: Source-free Domain Adaptation Through the Lens of Data Augmentation
In the face of the deep learning model's vulnerability to domain shift, source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) methods have been proposed to adapt models to new, unseen target domains without requiring access to source domain data. Although the potential benefits of applying data augmentation to SFDA are attractive, several challenges arise such as the dependence on prior knowledge of class-preserving transformations and the increase in memory and computational requirements. In this paper, we propose Source-free Domain Adaptation Through the Lens of Data Augmentation (SF(DA)^2), a novel approach that leverages the benefits of data augmentation without suffering from these challenges. We construct an augmentation graph in the feature space of the pretrained model using the neighbor relationships between target features and propose spectral neighborhood clustering to identify partitions in the prediction space. Furthermore, we propose implicit feature augmentation and feature disentanglement as regularization loss functions that effectively utilize class semantic information within the feature space. These regularizers simulate the inclusion of an unlimited number of augmented target features into the augmentation graph while minimizing computational and memory demands. Our method shows superior adaptation performance in SFDA scenarios, including 2D image and 3D point cloud datasets and a highly imbalanced dataset.
Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Image Segmentation
Domain adaptation (DA) has drawn high interest for its capacity to adapt a model trained on labeled source data to perform well on unlabeled or weakly labeled target data from a different domain. Most common DA techniques require concurrent access to the input images of both the source and target domains. However, in practice, privacy concerns often impede the availability of source images in the adaptation phase. This is a very frequent DA scenario in medical imaging, where, for instance, the source and target images could come from different clinical sites. We introduce a source-free domain adaptation for image segmentation. Our formulation is based on minimizing a label-free entropy loss defined over target-domain data, which we further guide with a domain-invariant prior on the segmentation regions. Many priors can be derived from anatomical information. Here, a class ratio prior is estimated from anatomical knowledge and integrated in the form of a Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence in our overall loss function. Furthermore, we motivate our overall loss with an interesting link to maximizing the mutual information between the target images and their label predictions. We show the effectiveness of our prior aware entropy minimization in a variety of domain-adaptation scenarios, with different modalities and applications, including spine, prostate, and cardiac segmentation. Our method yields comparable results to several state of the art adaptation techniques, despite having access to much less information, as the source images are entirely absent in our adaptation phase. Our straightforward adaptation strategy uses only one network, contrary to popular adversarial techniques, which are not applicable to a source-free DA setting. Our framework can be readily used in a breadth of segmentation problems, and our code is publicly available: https://github.com/mathilde-b/SFDA
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation
Top-performing deep architectures are trained on massive amounts of labeled data. In the absence of labeled data for a certain task, domain adaptation often provides an attractive option given that labeled data of similar nature but from a different domain (e.g. synthetic images) are available. Here, we propose a new approach to domain adaptation in deep architectures that can be trained on large amount of labeled data from the source domain and large amount of unlabeled data from the target domain (no labeled target-domain data is necessary). As the training progresses, the approach promotes the emergence of "deep" features that are (i) discriminative for the main learning task on the source domain and (ii) invariant with respect to the shift between the domains. We show that this adaptation behaviour can be achieved in almost any feed-forward model by augmenting it with few standard layers and a simple new gradient reversal layer. The resulting augmented architecture can be trained using standard backpropagation. Overall, the approach can be implemented with little effort using any of the deep-learning packages. The method performs very well in a series of image classification experiments, achieving adaptation effect in the presence of big domain shifts and outperforming previous state-of-the-art on Office datasets.
HyperDomainNet: Universal Domain Adaptation for Generative Adversarial Networks
Domain adaptation framework of GANs has achieved great progress in recent years as a main successful approach of training contemporary GANs in the case of very limited training data. In this work, we significantly improve this framework by proposing an extremely compact parameter space for fine-tuning the generator. We introduce a novel domain-modulation technique that allows to optimize only 6 thousand-dimensional vector instead of 30 million weights of StyleGAN2 to adapt to a target domain. We apply this parameterization to the state-of-art domain adaptation methods and show that it has almost the same expressiveness as the full parameter space. Additionally, we propose a new regularization loss that considerably enhances the diversity of the fine-tuned generator. Inspired by the reduction in the size of the optimizing parameter space we consider the problem of multi-domain adaptation of GANs, i.e. setting when the same model can adapt to several domains depending on the input query. We propose the HyperDomainNet that is a hypernetwork that predicts our parameterization given the target domain. We empirically confirm that it can successfully learn a number of domains at once and may even generalize to unseen domains. Source code can be found at https://github.com/MACderRu/HyperDomainNet
Unifying Vision, Text, and Layout for Universal Document Processing
We propose Universal Document Processing (UDOP), a foundation Document AI model which unifies text, image, and layout modalities together with varied task formats, including document understanding and generation. UDOP leverages the spatial correlation between textual content and document image to model image, text, and layout modalities with one uniform representation. With a novel Vision-Text-Layout Transformer, UDOP unifies pretraining and multi-domain downstream tasks into a prompt-based sequence generation scheme. UDOP is pretrained on both large-scale unlabeled document corpora using innovative self-supervised objectives and diverse labeled data. UDOP also learns to generate document images from text and layout modalities via masked image reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time in the field of document AI that one model simultaneously achieves high-quality neural document editing and content customization. Our method sets the state-of-the-art on 8 Document AI tasks, e.g., document understanding and QA, across diverse data domains like finance reports, academic papers, and websites. UDOP ranks first on the leaderboard of the Document Understanding Benchmark.
SFHarmony: Source Free Domain Adaptation for Distributed Neuroimaging Analysis
To represent the biological variability of clinical neuroimaging populations, it is vital to be able to combine data across scanners and studies. However, different MRI scanners produce images with different characteristics, resulting in a domain shift known as the `harmonisation problem'. Additionally, neuroimaging data is inherently personal in nature, leading to data privacy concerns when sharing the data. To overcome these barriers, we propose an Unsupervised Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) method, SFHarmony. Through modelling the imaging features as a Gaussian Mixture Model and minimising an adapted Bhattacharyya distance between the source and target features, we can create a model that performs well for the target data whilst having a shared feature representation across the data domains, without needing access to the source data for adaptation or target labels. We demonstrate the performance of our method on simulated and real domain shifts, showing that the approach is applicable to classification, segmentation and regression tasks, requiring no changes to the algorithm. Our method outperforms existing SFDA approaches across a range of realistic data scenarios, demonstrating the potential utility of our approach for MRI harmonisation and general SFDA problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/nkdinsdale/SFHarmony.
Sliced Wasserstein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
In this work, we connect two distinct concepts for unsupervised domain adaptation: feature distribution alignment between domains by utilizing the task-specific decision boundary and the Wasserstein metric. Our proposed sliced Wasserstein discrepancy (SWD) is designed to capture the natural notion of dissimilarity between the outputs of task-specific classifiers. It provides a geometrically meaningful guidance to detect target samples that are far from the support of the source and enables efficient distribution alignment in an end-to-end trainable fashion. In the experiments, we validate the effectiveness and genericness of our method on digit and sign recognition, image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection.
PyGDA: A Python Library for Graph Domain Adaptation
Graph domain adaptation has emerged as a promising approach to facilitate knowledge transfer across different domains. Recently, numerous models have been proposed to enhance their generalization capabilities in this field. However, there is still no unified library that brings together existing techniques and simplifies their implementation. To fill this gap, we introduce PyGDA, an open-source Python library tailored for graph domain adaptation. As the first comprehensive library in this area, PyGDA covers more than 20 widely used graph domain adaptation methods together with different types of graph datasets. Specifically, PyGDA offers modular components, enabling users to seamlessly build custom models with a variety of commonly used utility functions. To handle large-scale graphs, PyGDA includes support for features such as sampling and mini-batch processing, ensuring efficient computation. In addition, PyGDA also includes comprehensive performance benchmarks and well-documented user-friendly API for both researchers and practitioners. To foster convenient accessibility, PyGDA is released under the MIT license at https://github.com/pygda-team/pygda, and the API documentation is https://pygda.readthedocs.io/en/stable/.
SynRS3D: A Synthetic Dataset for Global 3D Semantic Understanding from Monocular Remote Sensing Imagery
Global semantic 3D understanding from single-view high-resolution remote sensing (RS) imagery is crucial for Earth Observation (EO). However, this task faces significant challenges due to the high costs of annotations and data collection, as well as geographically restricted data availability. To address these challenges, synthetic data offer a promising solution by being easily accessible and thus enabling the provision of large and diverse datasets. We develop a specialized synthetic data generation pipeline for EO and introduce SynRS3D, the largest synthetic RS 3D dataset. SynRS3D comprises 69,667 high-resolution optical images that cover six different city styles worldwide and feature eight land cover types, precise height information, and building change masks. To further enhance its utility, we develop a novel multi-task unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method, RS3DAda, coupled with our synthetic dataset, which facilitates the RS-specific transition from synthetic to real scenarios for land cover mapping and height estimation tasks, ultimately enabling global monocular 3D semantic understanding based on synthetic data. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate the adaptability and effectiveness of our synthetic dataset and proposed RS3DAda method. SynRS3D and related codes will be available.
Informative Data Mining for One-Shot Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation
Contemporary domain adaptation offers a practical solution for achieving cross-domain transfer of semantic segmentation between labeled source data and unlabeled target data. These solutions have gained significant popularity; however, they require the model to be retrained when the test environment changes. This can result in unbearable costs in certain applications due to the time-consuming training process and concerns regarding data privacy. One-shot domain adaptation methods attempt to overcome these challenges by transferring the pre-trained source model to the target domain using only one target data. Despite this, the referring style transfer module still faces issues with computation cost and over-fitting problems. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework called Informative Data Mining (IDM) that enables efficient one-shot domain adaptation for semantic segmentation. Specifically, IDM provides an uncertainty-based selection criterion to identify the most informative samples, which facilitates quick adaptation and reduces redundant training. We then perform a model adaptation method using these selected samples, which includes patch-wise mixing and prototype-based information maximization to update the model. This approach effectively enhances adaptation and mitigates the overfitting problem. In general, we provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness and efficiency of IDM. Our approach outperforms existing methods and achieves a new state-of-the-art one-shot performance of 56.7\%/55.4\% on the GTA5/SYNTHIA to Cityscapes adaptation tasks, respectively. The code will be released at https://github.com/yxiwang/IDM.
UDA-COPE: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Category-level Object Pose Estimation
Learning to estimate object pose often requires ground-truth (GT) labels, such as CAD model and absolute-scale object pose, which is expensive and laborious to obtain in the real world. To tackle this problem, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for category-level object pose estimation, called UDA-COPE. Inspired by recent multi-modal UDA techniques, the proposed method exploits a teacher-student self-supervised learning scheme to train a pose estimation network without using target domain pose labels. We also introduce a bidirectional filtering method between the predicted normalized object coordinate space (NOCS) map and observed point cloud, to not only make our teacher network more robust to the target domain but also to provide more reliable pseudo labels for the student network training. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method both quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, without leveraging target-domain GT labels, our proposed method achieved comparable or sometimes superior performance to existing methods that depend on the GT labels.
Multi-Prompt Progressive Alignment for Multi-Source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Large Vision-Language Models like CLIP have become a powerful foundation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation due to their strong zero-shot generalization. State-of-the-art methods typically leverage CLIP to generate pseudo-labels for the target domain, then fine-tune the model to learn domain-invariant features. However, these methods attempt to align source and target domains using all pseudo-labeled data simultaneously. This one-shot alignment struggles with noisy, hard-to-classify samples, leading to error propagation and suboptimal feature learning. The problem is even more amplified in the multi-source scenario, where diverse domain gaps and varying noise levels across multiple source domains further destabilize the alignment process. To address this issue, in this work, we propose a progressive alignment strategy for adapting CLIP to unlabeled downstream task. Our method begins by training the model on a high-confidence subset of target samples, allowing it to first learn a well-aligned representation from the most reliable data. As training progresses, it gradually incorporates more challenging samples, guiding the model to refine its understanding without being overwhelmed by initial label noise. This progressive approach effectively mitigates confirmation bias and promotes a more robust convergence, allowing for the learning of genuinely domain-invariant features. We name our approach MP^2A and test it on three popular UDA benchmarks, namely ImageCLEF, Office-Home, and the most challenging DomainNet. Experiments showcase that MP^2A achieves state-of-the-art performance when compared with most recent CLIP-based MS-UDA approaches, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
Revisiting Domain-Adaptive 3D Object Detection by Reliable, Diverse and Class-balanced Pseudo-Labeling
Unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) with the aid of pseudo labeling techniques has emerged as a crucial approach for domain-adaptive 3D object detection. While effective, existing DA methods suffer from a substantial drop in performance when applied to a multi-class training setting, due to the co-existence of low-quality pseudo labels and class imbalance issues. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a novel ReDB framework tailored for learning to detect all classes at once. Our approach produces Reliable, Diverse, and class-Balanced pseudo 3D boxes to iteratively guide the self-training on a distributionally different target domain. To alleviate disruptions caused by the environmental discrepancy (e.g., beam numbers), the proposed cross-domain examination (CDE) assesses the correctness of pseudo labels by copy-pasting target instances into a source environment and measuring the prediction consistency. To reduce computational overhead and mitigate the object shift (e.g., scales and point densities), we design an overlapped boxes counting (OBC) metric that allows to uniformly downsample pseudo-labeled objects across different geometric characteristics. To confront the issue of inter-class imbalance, we progressively augment the target point clouds with a class-balanced set of pseudo-labeled target instances and source objects, which boosts recognition accuracies on both frequently appearing and rare classes. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets using both voxel-based (i.e., SECOND) and point-based 3D detectors (i.e., PointRCNN) demonstrate that our proposed ReDB approach outperforms existing 3D domain adaptation methods by a large margin, improving 23.15% mAP on the nuScenes rightarrow KITTI task. The code is available at https://github.com/zhuoxiao-chen/ReDB-DA-3Ddet.
DomainVerse: A Benchmark Towards Real-World Distribution Shifts For Tuning-Free Adaptive Domain Generalization
Traditional cross-domain tasks, including domain adaptation and domain generalization, rely heavily on training model by source domain data. With the recent advance of vision-language models (VLMs), viewed as natural source models, the cross-domain task changes to directly adapt the pre-trained source model to arbitrary target domains equipped with prior domain knowledge, and we name this task Adaptive Domain Generalization (ADG). However, current cross-domain datasets have many limitations, such as unrealistic domains, unclear domain definitions, and the inability to fine-grained domain decomposition, which drives us to establish a novel dataset DomainVerse for ADG. Benefiting from the introduced hierarchical definition of domain shifts, DomainVerse consists of about 0.5 million images from 390 fine-grained realistic domains. With the help of the constructed DomainVerse and VLMs, we propose two methods called Domain CLIP and Domain++ CLIP for tuning-free adaptive domain generalization. Extensive and comprehensive experiments demonstrate the significance of the dataset and the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
A Unified Data Augmentation Framework for Low-Resource Multi-Domain Dialogue Generation
Current state-of-the-art dialogue systems heavily rely on extensive training datasets. However, challenges arise in domains where domain-specific training datasets are insufficient or entirely absent. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel data Augmentation framework for Multi-Domain Dialogue Generation, referred to as AMD^2G. The AMD^2G framework consists of a data augmentation process and a two-stage training approach: domain-agnostic training and domain adaptation training. We posit that domain corpora are a blend of domain-agnostic and domain-specific features, with certain representation patterns shared among diverse domains. Domain-agnostic training aims to enable models to learn these common expressive patterns. To construct domain-agnostic dialogue corpora, we employ a \textbf{de-domaining} data processing technique used to remove domain-specific features. By mitigating the effects of domain-specific features, the model trained on the de-domained corpora can effectively learn common expression patterns in different domains. Subsequently, we adapt the learned domain-agnostic features to the target domain through domain adaptation training. We conduct experiments on Chinese dialogue datasets from five different domains and show that AMD^2G achieves superior performance compared to both direct training on the target domain corpus and collective training on all five domain corpora. Our work underscores AMD^2G as a viable alternative solution for low-resource multi-domain dialogue generation. Code and data associated with our work are available on GitHub repository^{text 1}.
Generalized Domain Conditioned Adaptation Network
Domain Adaptation (DA) attempts to transfer knowledge learned in the labeled source domain to the unlabeled but related target domain without requiring large amounts of target supervision. Recent advances in DA mainly proceed by aligning the source and target distributions. Despite the significant success, the adaptation performance still degrades accordingly when the source and target domains encounter a large distribution discrepancy. We consider this limitation may attribute to the insufficient exploration of domain-specialized features because most studies merely concentrate on domain-general feature learning in task-specific layers and integrate totally-shared convolutional networks (convnets) to generate common features for both domains. In this paper, we relax the completely-shared convnets assumption adopted by previous DA methods and propose Domain Conditioned Adaptation Network (DCAN), which introduces domain conditioned channel attention module with a multi-path structure to separately excite channel activation for each domain. Such a partially-shared convnets module allows domain-specialized features in low-level to be explored appropriately. Further, given the knowledge transferability varying along with convolutional layers, we develop Generalized Domain Conditioned Adaptation Network (GDCAN) to automatically determine whether domain channel activations should be separately modeled in each attention module. Afterward, the critical domain-specialized knowledge could be adaptively extracted according to the domain statistic gaps. As far as we know, this is the first work to explore the domain-wise convolutional channel activations separately for deep DA networks. Additionally, to effectively match high-level feature distributions across domains, we consider deploying feature adaptation blocks after task-specific layers, which can explicitly mitigate the domain discrepancy.
DPA: Dual Prototypes Alignment for Unsupervised Adaptation of Vision-Language Models
Vision-language models (VLMs), e.g., CLIP, have shown remarkable potential in zero-shot image classification. However, adapting these models to new domains remains challenging, especially in unsupervised settings where labelled data is unavailable. Recent research has proposed pseudo-labelling approaches to adapt CLIP in an unsupervised manner using unlabelled target data. Nonetheless, these methods struggle due to noisy pseudo-labels resulting from the misalignment between CLIP's visual and textual representations. This study introduces DPA, an unsupervised domain adaptation method for VLMs. DPA introduces the concept of dual prototypes, acting as distinct classifiers, along with the convex combination of their outputs, thereby leading to accurate pseudo-label construction. Next, it ranks pseudo-labels to facilitate robust self-training, particularly during early training. Finally, it addresses visual-textual misalignment by aligning textual prototypes with image prototypes to further improve the adaptation performance. Experiments on 13 downstream vision tasks demonstrate that DPA significantly outperforms zero-shot CLIP and the state-of-the-art unsupervised adaptation baselines.
CORE-ReID V2: Advancing the Domain Adaptation for Object Re-Identification with Optimized Training and Ensemble Fusion
This study presents CORE-ReID V2, an enhanced framework building upon CORE-ReID. The new framework extends its predecessor by addressing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) challenges in Person ReID and Vehicle ReID, with further applicability to Object ReID. During pre-training, CycleGAN is employed to synthesize diverse data, bridging image characteristic gaps across different domains. In the fine-tuning, an advanced ensemble fusion mechanism, consisting of the Efficient Channel Attention Block (ECAB) and the Simplified Efficient Channel Attention Block (SECAB), enhances both local and global feature representations while reducing ambiguity in pseudo-labels for target samples. Experimental results on widely used UDA Person ReID and Vehicle ReID datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving top performance in Mean Average Precision (mAP) and Rank-k Accuracy (Top-1, Top-5, Top-10). Moreover, the framework supports lightweight backbones such as ResNet18 and ResNet34, ensuring both scalability and efficiency. Our work not only pushes the boundaries of UDA-based Object ReID but also provides a solid foundation for further research and advancements in this domain. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/TrinhQuocNguyen/CORE-ReID-V2.
Unsupervised Video Domain Adaptation for Action Recognition: A Disentanglement Perspective
Unsupervised video domain adaptation is a practical yet challenging task. In this work, for the first time, we tackle it from a disentanglement view. Our key idea is to handle the spatial and temporal domain divergence separately through disentanglement. Specifically, we consider the generation of cross-domain videos from two sets of latent factors, one encoding the static information and another encoding the dynamic information. A Transfer Sequential VAE (TranSVAE) framework is then developed to model such generation. To better serve for adaptation, we propose several objectives to constrain the latent factors. With these constraints, the spatial divergence can be readily removed by disentangling the static domain-specific information out, and the temporal divergence is further reduced from both frame- and video-levels through adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on the UCF-HMDB, Jester, and Epic-Kitchens datasets verify the effectiveness and superiority of TranSVAE compared with several state-of-the-art approaches. Code is publicly available.
CAFA: Class-Aware Feature Alignment for Test-Time Adaptation
Despite recent advancements in deep learning, deep neural networks continue to suffer from performance degradation when applied to new data that differs from training data. Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to address this challenge by adapting a model to unlabeled data at test time. TTA can be applied to pretrained networks without modifying their training procedures, enabling them to utilize a well-formed source distribution for adaptation. One possible approach is to align the representation space of test samples to the source distribution (i.e., feature alignment). However, performing feature alignment in TTA is especially challenging in that access to labeled source data is restricted during adaptation. That is, a model does not have a chance to learn test data in a class-discriminative manner, which was feasible in other adaptation tasks (e.g., unsupervised domain adaptation) via supervised losses on the source data. Based on this observation, we propose a simple yet effective feature alignment loss, termed as Class-Aware Feature Alignment (CAFA), which simultaneously 1) encourages a model to learn target representations in a class-discriminative manner and 2) effectively mitigates the distribution shifts at test time. Our method does not require any hyper-parameters or additional losses, which are required in previous approaches. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 different datasets and show our proposed method consistently outperforms existing baselines.
DomainAdaptor: A Novel Approach to Test-time Adaptation
To deal with the domain shift between training and test samples, current methods have primarily focused on learning generalizable features during training and ignore the specificity of unseen samples that are also critical during the test. In this paper, we investigate a more challenging task that aims to adapt a trained CNN model to unseen domains during the test. To maximumly mine the information in the test data, we propose a unified method called DomainAdaptor for the test-time adaptation, which consists of an AdaMixBN module and a Generalized Entropy Minimization (GEM) loss. Specifically, AdaMixBN addresses the domain shift by adaptively fusing training and test statistics in the normalization layer via a dynamic mixture coefficient and a statistic transformation operation. To further enhance the adaptation ability of AdaMixBN, we design a GEM loss that extends the Entropy Minimization loss to better exploit the information in the test data. Extensive experiments show that DomainAdaptor consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four benchmarks. Furthermore, our method brings more remarkable improvement against existing methods on the few-data unseen domain. The code is available at https://github.com/koncle/DomainAdaptor.
