Backprop Induced Feature Weighting for Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Iterative Label Distribution Alignment

Abstract

The requirement for large labeled datasets is one of the limiting factors for training accurate deep neural networks. Unsupervised domain adaptation tackles this problem of limited training data by transferring knowledge from one domain, which has many labeled data, to a different domain for which little to no labeled data is available. One common approach is to learn domain-invariant features for example with an adversarial approach. Previous methods often train the domain classifier and label classifier network separately, where both classification networks have little interaction with each other. In this paper, we introduce a classifier-based backprop-induced weighting of the feature space. This approach has two main advantages. Firstly, it lets the domain classifier focus on features that are important for the classification, and, secondly, it couples the classification and adversarial branch more closely. Furthermore, we introduce an iterative label distribution alignment method, that employs results of previous runs to approximate a class-balanced dataloader. We conduct experiments and ablation studies on three benchmarks Office-31, Office-Home, and DomainNet to show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.