LEAD: Learning Decomposition for Source-free Universal Domain Adaptation
Authors: Sanqing Qu, Tianpei Zou, Lianghua He, Florian Röhrbein, Alois Knoll, Guang Chen, Changjun Jiang

Universal Domain Adaptation (UniDA) targets knowledge transfer in the presence of both covariate and label shifts. Recently Source-free Universal Domain Adaptation (SF-UniDA) has emerged to achieve UniDA without access to source data which tends to be more practical due to data protection policies. The main challenge lies in determining whether covariate-shifted samples belong to target-private unknown categories. Existing methods tackle this either through hand-crafted thresholding or by developing time-consuming iterative clustering strategies. In this paper we propose a new idea of LEArning Decomposition (LEAD) which decouples features into source-known and -unknown components to identify target-private data. Technically LEAD initially leverages the orthogonal decomposition analysis for feature decomposition. Then LEAD builds instance-level decision boundaries to adaptively identify target-private data. Extensive experiments across various UniDA scenarios have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of LEAD. Notably in the OPDA scenario on VisDA dataset LEAD outperforms GLC by 3.5% overall H-score and reduces 75% time to derive pseudo-labeling decision boundaries. Besides LEAD is also appealing in that it is complementary to most existing methods. The code is available at https://github. com/ispc-lab/LEAD