Dapeng Hu

Dapeng Hu, Jian Liang, Xinchao Wang et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has witnessed remarkable advancements in improving the accuracy of models for unlabeled target domains. However, the calibration of predictive uncertainty in the target domain, a crucial aspect of the safe deployment of UDA models, has received limited attention. The conventional in-domain calibration method, \textit{temperature scaling} (TempScal), encounters challenges due to domain distribution shifts and the absence of labeled target domain data. Recent approaches have employed importance-weighting techniques to estimate the target-optimal temperature based on re-weighted labeled source data. Nonetheless, these methods require source data and suffer from unreliable density estimates under severe domain shifts, rendering them unsuitable for source-free UDA settings. To overcome these limitations, we propose PseudoCal, a source-free calibration method that exclusively relies on unlabeled target data. Unlike previous approaches that treat UDA calibration as a \textit{covariate shift} problem, we consider it as an unsupervised calibration problem specific to the target domain. Motivated by the factorization of the negative log-likelihood (NLL) objective in TempScal, we generate a labeled pseudo-target set that captures the structure of the real target. By doing so, we transform the unsupervised calibration problem into a supervised one, enabling us to effectively address it using widely-used in-domain methods like TempScal. Finally, we thoroughly evaluate the calibration performance of PseudoCal by conducting extensive experiments on 10 UDA methods, considering both traditional UDA settings and recent source-free UDA scenarios. The experimental results consistently demonstrate the superior performance of PseudoCal, exhibiting significantly reduced calibration error compared to existing calibration methods.

Jian Liang, Dapeng Hu, Jiashi Feng et al.

To ease the burden of labeling, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge in previous and related labeled datasets (sources) to a new unlabeled dataset (target). Despite impressive progress, prior methods always need to access the raw source data and develop data-dependent alignment approaches to recognize the target samples in a transductive learning manner, which may raise privacy concerns from source individuals. Several recent studies resort to an alternative solution by exploiting the well-trained white-box model from the source domain, yet, it may still leak the raw data through generative adversarial learning. This paper studies a practical and interesting setting for UDA, where only black-box source models (i.e., only network predictions are available) are provided during adaptation in the target domain. To solve this problem, we propose a new two-step knowledge adaptation framework called DIstill and fine-tuNE (DINE). Taking into consideration the target data structure, DINE first distills the knowledge from the source predictor to a customized target model, then fine-tunes the distilled model to further fit the target domain. Besides, neural networks are not required to be identical across domains in DINE, even allowing effective adaptation on a low-resource device. Empirical results on three UDA scenarios (i.e., single-source, multi-source, and partial-set) confirm that DINE achieves highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art data-dependent approaches. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/tim-learn/DINE/}.

Jian Liang, Dapeng Hu, Yunbo Wang et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a related but different well-labeled source domain to a new unlabeled target domain. Most existing UDA methods require access to the source data, and thus are not applicable when the data are confidential and not shareable due to privacy concerns. This paper aims to tackle a realistic setting with only a classification model available trained over, instead of accessing to, the source data. To effectively utilize the source model for adaptation, we propose a novel approach called Source HypOthesis Transfer (SHOT), which learns the feature extraction module for the target domain by fitting the target data features to the frozen source classification module (representing classification hypothesis). Specifically, SHOT exploits both information maximization and self-supervised learning for the feature extraction module learning to ensure the target features are implicitly aligned with the features of unseen source data via the same hypothesis. Furthermore, we propose a new labeling transfer strategy, which separates the target data into two splits based on the confidence of predictions (labeling information), and then employ semi-supervised learning to improve the accuracy of less-confident predictions in the target domain. We denote labeling transfer as SHOT++ if the predictions are obtained by SHOT. Extensive experiments on both digit classification and object recognition tasks show that SHOT and SHOT++ achieve results surpassing or comparable to the state-of-the-arts, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approaches for various visual domain adaptation problems. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/tim-learn/SHOT-plus}.

Jian Liang, Yunbo Wang, Dapeng Hu et al.

This work addresses the unsupervised domain adaptation problem, especially in the case of class labels in the target domain being only a subset of those in the source domain. Such a partial transfer setting is realistic but challenging and existing methods always suffer from two key problems, negative transfer and uncertainty propagation. In this paper, we build on domain adversarial learning and propose a novel domain adaptation method BA$^3$US with two new techniques termed Balanced Adversarial Alignment (BAA) and Adaptive Uncertainty Suppression (AUS), respectively. On one hand, negative transfer results in misclassification of target samples to the classes only present in the source domain. To address this issue, BAA pursues the balance between label distributions across domains in a fairly simple manner. Specifically, it randomly leverages a few source samples to augment the smaller target domain during domain alignment so that classes in different domains are symmetric. On the other hand, a source sample would be denoted as uncertain if there is an incorrect class that has a relatively high prediction score, and such uncertainty easily propagates to unlabeled target data around it during alignment, which severely deteriorates adaptation performance. Thus we present AUS that emphasizes uncertain samples and exploits an adaptive weighted complement entropy objective to encourage incorrect classes to have uniform and low prediction scores. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate our BA$^3$US surpasses state-of-the-arts for partial domain adaptation tasks. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/tim-learn/BA3US}.

Yongcan Yu, Lingxiao He, Shuo Lu et al.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies suggest that introducing the SFT stage not only fails to improve reasoning ability but may also negatively impact model training. In this study, we revisit this RL-centric belief through a systematic and controlled comparison of SFT and RL on VLM Reasoning. Using identical data sources, we find that the relative effectiveness of SFT and RL is conditional and strongly influenced by model capacity, data scale, and data distribution. Contrary to common assumptions, our findings show that SFT plays a crucial role across several scenarios: (1) Effectiveness for weaker models. SFT more reliably elicits reasoning capabilities in smaller or weaker VLMs. (2) Data efficiency. SFT with only 2K achieves comparable or better reasoning performance to RL with 20K. (3) Cross-modal transferability. SFT demonstrates stronger generalization across modalities. Moreover, we identify a pervasive issue of deceptive rewards, where higher rewards fail to correlate with better reasoning accuracy in RL. These results challenge the prevailing "RL over SFT" narrative. They highlight that the role of SFT may have been underestimated and support a more balanced post-training pipeline in which SFT and RL function as complementary components.

Aditya Dave, Mengchen Zhu, Dapeng Hu et al.

Corporate Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission targets are important metrics in sustainable investing [12, 16]. To provide a comprehensive view of company emission objectives, we propose an approach to source these metrics from company public disclosures. Without automation, curating these metrics manually is a labor-intensive process that requires combing through lengthy corporate sustainability disclosures that often do not follow a standard format. Furthermore, the resulting dataset needs to be validated thoroughly by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), further lengthening the time-to-market. We introduce the Climate Artificial Intelligence for Corporate Decarbonization Metrics Extraction (CAI) model and pipeline, a novel approach utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract and validate linked metrics from corporate disclosures. We demonstrate that the process improves data collection efficiency and accuracy by automating data curation, validation, and metric scoring from public corporate disclosures. We further show that our results are agnostic to the choice of LLMs. This framework can be applied broadly to information extraction from textual data.

Jian Liang, Dapeng Hu, Jiashi Feng et al.

Learning to reject unknown samples (not present in the source classes) in the target domain is fairly important for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). There exist two typical UDA scenarios, i.e., open-set, and open-partial-set, and the latter assumes that not all source classes appear in the target domain. However, most prior methods are designed for one UDA scenario and always perform badly on the other UDA scenario. Moreover, they also require the labeled source data during adaptation, limiting their usability in data privacy-sensitive applications. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Universal Model ADaptation (UMAD) framework which handles both UDA scenarios without access to the source data nor prior knowledge about the category shift between domains. Specifically, we aim to learn a source model with an elegantly designed two-head classifier and provide it to the target domain. During adaptation, we develop an informative consistency score to help distinguish unknown samples from known samples. To achieve bilateral adaptation in the target domain, we further maximize localized mutual information to align known samples with the source classifier and employ an entropic loss to push unknown samples far away from the source classification boundary, respectively. Experiments on open-set and open-partial-set UDA scenarios demonstrate that UMAD, as a unified approach without access to source data, exhibits comparable, if not superior, performance to state-of-the-art data-dependent methods.

Mi Luo, Fei Chen, Dapeng Hu et al.

A central challenge in training classification models in the real-world federated system is learning with non-IID data. To cope with this, most of the existing works involve enforcing regularization in local optimization or improving the model aggregation scheme at the server. Other works also share public datasets or synthesized samples to supplement the training of under-represented classes or introduce a certain level of personalization. Though effective, they lack a deep understanding of how the data heterogeneity affects each layer of a deep classification model. In this paper, we bridge this gap by performing an experimental analysis of the representations learned by different layers. Our observations are surprising: (1) there exists a greater bias in the classifier than other layers, and (2) the classification performance can be significantly improved by post-calibrating the classifier after federated training. Motivated by the above findings, we propose a novel and simple algorithm called Classifier Calibration with Virtual Representations (CCVR), which adjusts the classifier using virtual representations sampled from an approximated gaussian mixture model. Experimental results demonstrate that CCVR achieves state-of-the-art performance on popular federated learning benchmarks including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CINIC-10. We hope that our simple yet effective method can shed some light on the future research of federated learning with non-IID data.

Dapeng Hu, Shipeng Yan, Qizhengqiu Lu et al.

Prior works on self-supervised pre-training focus on the joint training scenario, where massive unlabeled data are assumed to be given as input all at once, and only then is a learner trained. Unfortunately, such a problem setting is often impractical if not infeasible since many real-world tasks rely on sequential learning, e.g., data are decentralized or collected in a streaming fashion. In this paper, we conduct the first thorough and dedicated investigation on self-supervised pre-training with streaming data, aiming to shed light on the model behavior under this overlooked setup. Specifically, we pre-train over 500 models on four categories of pre-training streaming data from ImageNet and DomainNet and evaluate them on three types of downstream tasks and 12 different downstream datasets. Our studies show that, somehow beyond our expectation, with simple data replay or parameter regularization, sequential self-supervised pre-training turns out to be an efficient alternative for joint pre-training, as the performances of the former are mostly on par with those of the latter. Moreover, catastrophic forgetting, a common issue in sequential supervised learning, is much alleviated in sequential self-supervised learning (SSL), which is well justified through our comprehensive empirical analysis on representations and the sharpness of minima in the loss landscape. Our findings, therefore, suggest that, in practice, for SSL, the cumbersome joint training can be replaced mainly by sequential learning, which in turn enables a much broader spectrum of potential application scenarios.

Yifan Zhang, Bryan Hooi, Dapeng Hu et al.

Contrastive self-supervised learning (CSL) has attracted increasing attention for model pre-training via unlabeled data. The resulted CSL models provide instance-discriminative visual features that are uniformly scattered in the feature space. During deployment, the common practice is to directly fine-tune CSL models with cross-entropy, which however may not be the best strategy in practice. Although cross-entropy tends to separate inter-class features, the resulting models still have limited capability for reducing intra-class feature scattering that exists in CSL models. In this paper, we investigate whether applying contrastive learning to fine-tuning would bring further benefits, and analytically find that optimizing the contrastive loss benefits both discriminative representation learning and model optimization during fine-tuning. Inspired by these findings, we propose Contrast-regularized tuning (Core-tuning), a new approach for fine-tuning CSL models. Instead of simply adding the contrastive loss to the objective of fine-tuning, Core-tuning further applies a novel hard pair mining strategy for more effective contrastive fine-tuning, as well as smoothing the decision boundary to better exploit the learned discriminative feature space. Extensive experiments on image classification and semantic segmentation verify the effectiveness of Core-tuning.

Jian Liang, Dapeng Hu, Jiashi Feng

Domain adaptation (DA) aims to transfer knowledge from a label-rich but heterogeneous domain to a label-scare domain, which alleviates the labeling efforts and attracts considerable attention. Different from previous methods focusing on learning domain-invariant feature representations, some recent methods present generic semi-supervised learning (SSL) techniques and directly apply them to DA tasks, even achieving competitive performance. One of the most popular SSL techniques is pseudo-labeling that assigns pseudo labels for each unlabeled data via the classifier trained by labeled data. However, it ignores the distribution shift in DA problems and is inevitably biased to source data. To address this issue, we propose a new pseudo-labeling framework called Auxiliary Target Domain-Oriented Classifier (ATDOC). ATDOC alleviates the classifier bias by introducing an auxiliary classifier for target data only, to improve the quality of pseudo labels. Specifically, we employ the memory mechanism and develop two types of non-parametric classifiers, i.e. the nearest centroid classifier and neighborhood aggregation, without introducing any additional network parameters. Despite its simplicity in a pseudo classification objective, ATDOC with neighborhood aggregation significantly outperforms domain alignment techniques and prior SSL techniques on a large variety of DA benchmarks and even scare-labeled SSL tasks.

Dapeng Hu, Jian Liang, Qibin Hou et al.

In this work, we attempt to address unsupervised domain adaptation by devising simple and compact conditional domain adversarial training methods. We first revisit the simple concatenation conditioning strategy where features are concatenated with output predictions as the input of the discriminator. We find the concatenation strategy suffers from the weak conditioning strength. We further demonstrate that enlarging the norm of concatenated predictions can effectively energize the conditional domain alignment. Thus we improve concatenation conditioning by normalizing the output predictions to have the same norm of features, and term the derived method as Normalized OutpUt coNditioner~(NOUN). However, conditioning on raw output predictions for domain alignment, NOUN suffers from inaccurate predictions of the target domain. To this end, we propose to condition the cross-domain feature alignment in the prototype space rather than in the output space. Combining the novel prototype-based conditioning with NOUN, we term the enhanced method as PROtotype-based Normalized OutpUt coNditioner~(PRONOUN). Experiments on both object recognition and semantic segmentation show that NOUN can effectively align the multi-modal structures across domains and even outperform state-of-the-art domain adversarial training methods. Together with prototype-based conditioning, PRONOUN further improves the adaptation performance over NOUN on multiple object recognition benchmarks for UDA.

Jian Liang, Dapeng Hu, Jiashi Feng

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to leverage the knowledge learned from a labeled source dataset to solve similar tasks in a new unlabeled domain. Prior UDA methods typically require to access the source data when learning to adapt the model, making them risky and inefficient for decentralized private data. This work tackles a practical setting where only a trained source model is available and investigates how we can effectively utilize such a model without source data to solve UDA problems. We propose a simple yet generic representation learning framework, named \emph{Source HypOthesis Transfer} (SHOT). SHOT freezes the classifier module (hypothesis) of the source model and learns the target-specific feature extraction module by exploiting both information maximization and self-supervised pseudo-labeling to implicitly align representations from the target domains to the source hypothesis. To verify its versatility, we evaluate SHOT in a variety of adaptation cases including closed-set, partial-set, and open-set domain adaptation. Experiments indicate that SHOT yields state-of-the-art results among multiple domain adaptation benchmarks.