Restyling Data: Application to Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
This work addresses the challenge of adapting models from synthetic to real-world data without labels, offering a scalable and efficient alternative to existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation by using photorealistic style transfer as data pre-processing to avoid complex adversarial training, achieving competitive performance with simpler implementation.
Machine learning is driven by data, yet while their availability is constantly increasing, training data require laborious, time consuming and error-prone labelling or ground truth acquisition, which in some cases is very difficult or even impossible. Recent works have resorted to synthetic data generation, but the inferior performance of models trained on synthetic data when applied to the real world, introduced the challenge of unsupervised domain adaptation. In this work we investigate an unsupervised domain adaptation technique that descends from another perspective, in order to avoid the complexity of adversarial training and cycle consistencies. We exploit the recent advances in photorealistic style transfer and take a fully data driven approach. While this concept is already implicitly formulated within the intricate objectives of domain adaptation GANs, we take an explicit approach and apply it directly as data pre-processing. The resulting technique is scalable, efficient and easy to implement, offers competitive performance to the complex state-of-the-art alternatives and can open up new pathways for domain adaptation.