Contrastively Smoothed Class Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
This work addresses domain adaptation for machine learning models, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods to improve alignment for ambiguous samples.
The paper tackles the problem of aligning ambiguous target samples in unsupervised domain adaptation by proposing a Contrastively Smoothed Class Alignment model, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets by producing more discriminative features.
Recent unsupervised approaches to domain adaptation primarily focus on minimizing the gap between the source and the target domains through refining the feature generator, in order to learn a better alignment between the two domains. This minimization can be achieved via a domain classifier to detect target-domain features that are divergent from source-domain features. However, by optimizing via such domain classification discrepancy, ambiguous target samples that are not smoothly distributed on the low-dimensional data manifold are often missed. To solve this issue, we propose a novel Contrastively Smoothed Class Alignment (CoSCA) model, that explicitly incorporates both intra- and inter-class domain discrepancy to better align ambiguous target samples with the source domain. CoSCA estimates the underlying label hypothesis of target samples, and simultaneously adapts their feature representations by optimizing a proposed contrastive loss. In addition, Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) is utilized to directly match features between source and target samples for better global alignment. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that CoSCA can outperform state-of-the-art approaches for unsupervised domain adaptation by producing more discriminative features.