Deep causal representation learning for unsupervised domain adaptation
This work addresses the challenge of domain adaptation in machine learning by focusing on causal rather than correlated representations, which is an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of learning transferable feature representations for unsupervised domain adaptation by proposing a deep causal representation learning framework that estimates causal effects of features on outcomes, demonstrating its strengths in comparative studies.
Studies show that the representations learned by deep neural networks can be transferred to similar prediction tasks in other domains for which we do not have enough labeled data. However, as we transition to higher layers in the model, the representations become more task-specific and less generalizable. Recent research on deep domain adaptation proposed to mitigate this problem by forcing the deep model to learn more transferable feature representations across domains. This is achieved by incorporating domain adaptation methods into deep learning pipeline. The majority of existing models learn the transferable feature representations which are highly correlated with the outcome. However, correlations are not always transferable. In this paper, we propose a novel deep causal representation learning framework for unsupervised domain adaptation, in which we propose to learn domain-invariant causal representations of the input from the source domain. We simulate a virtual target domain using reweighted samples from the source domain and estimate the causal effect of features on the outcomes. The extensive comparative study demonstrates the strengths of the proposed model for unsupervised domain adaptation via causal representations.