DAPDAG: Domain Adaptation via Perturbed DAG Reconstruction
This addresses domain adaptation for leveraging labeled data from multiple domains to predict in an unlabeled target domain, representing an incremental/hybrid method.
The paper tackles the problem of domain adaptation by learning an auto-encoder that reconstructs a directed acyclic graph (DAG) as an auxiliary task, assuming invariant DAG structure across domains with varying conditional distributions. It achieves competitive performance in prediction tasks, with better adaptation ability in target domains significantly different from source domains.
Leveraging labelled data from multiple domains to enable prediction in another domain without labels is a significant, yet challenging problem. To address this problem, we introduce the framework DAPDAG (\textbf{D}omain \textbf{A}daptation via \textbf{P}erturbed \textbf{DAG} Reconstruction) and propose to learn an auto-encoder that undertakes inference on population statistics given features and reconstructing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) as an auxiliary task. The underlying DAG structure is assumed invariant among observed variables whose conditional distributions are allowed to vary across domains led by a latent environmental variable $E$. The encoder is designed to serve as an inference device on $E$ while the decoder reconstructs each observed variable conditioned on its graphical parents in the DAG and the inferred $E$. We train the encoder and decoder jointly in an end-to-end manner and conduct experiments on synthetic and real datasets with mixed variables. Empirical results demonstrate that reconstructing the DAG benefits the approximate inference. Furthermore, our approach can achieve competitive performance against other benchmarks in prediction tasks, with better adaptation ability, especially in the target domain significantly different from the source domains.