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Title: A DIRT-T Approach to Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Paper content:
Domain adaptation refers to the problem of leveraging labeled data in a source domain to learn an accurate model in a target domain where labels are scarce or unavailable.
A recent approach for finding a common representation of the two domains is via domain adversarial training (Ganin & Lempitsky, 2015), which attempts to induce a feature extractor that matches the source and target feature distributions in some feature space.
However, domain adversarial training faces two critical limitations:
1) if the feature extraction function has high-capacity, then feature distribution matching is a weak constraint,
2) in non-conservative domain adaptation (where no single classifier can perform well in both the source and target domains), training the model to do well on the source domain hurts performance on the target domain.
In this paper, we address these issues through the lens of the cluster assumption, i.e., decision boundaries should not cross high-density data regions.
We propose two novel and related models:
1) the Virtual Adversarial Domain Adaptation (VADA) model, which combines domain adversarial training with a penalty term that punishes the violation the cluster assumption;
2) the Decision-boundary Iterative Refinement Training with a Teacher (DIRT-T) model, which takes the VADA model as initialization and employs natural gradient steps to further minimize the cluster assumption violation.
Extensive empirical results demonstrate that the combination of these two models significantly improve the state-of-the-art performance on the digit, traffic sign, and Wi-Fi recognition domain adaptation benchmarks.
The development of deep neural networks has enabled impressive performance in a wide variety of machine learning tasks.
However, these advancements often rely on the existence of a large amount of labeled training data.
In many cases, direct access to vast quantities of labeled data for the task of interest (the target domain) is either costly or otherwise absent, but labels are readily available for related training sets (the source domain).
A notable example of this scenario occurs when the source domain consists of richly-annotated synthetic or semi-synthetic data, but the target domain consists of unannotated real-world data BID28 Vazquez et al., 2014) .
However, the source data distribution is often dissimilar to the target data distribution, and the resulting significant covariate shift is detrimental to the performance of the source-trained model when applied to the target domain BID27 .Solving
the covariate shift problem of this nature is an instance of domain adaptation BID2 . In this
paper, we consider a challenging setting of domain adaptation where 1) we are
provided with fully-labeled source samples and completely-unlabeled target samples, and 2) the existence
of a classifier in the hypothesis space with low generalization error in both source and target domains is not guaranteed. Borrowing approximately
the terminology from BID2 , we refer to this setting as unsupervised, non-conservative domain adaptation. We note that this is in
contrast to conservative domain adaptation, where we assume our hypothesis space contains a classifier that performs well in both the source and target domains.To tackle unsupervised domain adaptation, BID9 proposed to constrain the classifier to only rely on domain-invariant features. This is achieved by training
the classifier to perform well on the source domain while minimizing the divergence between features extracted from the source versus target domains. To achieve divergence minimization
, BID9 employ domain adversarial training. We highlight two issues with this
approach: 1) when the feature function has
high-capacity and the source-target supports are disjoint, the domain-invariance constraint is potentially very weak (see Section 3), and 2) good generalization on the source
domain hurts target performance in the non-conservative setting. BID24 addressed these issues by replacing
domain adversarial training with asymmetric tri-training (ATT), which relies on the assumption that target samples that are labeled by a sourcetrained classifier with high confidence are correctly labeled by the source classifier. In this paper, we consider an orthogonal
assumption: the cluster assumption BID5 , that the input distribution contains separated data clusters and that data samples in the same cluster share the same class label. This assumption introduces an additional
bias where we seek decision boundaries that do not go through high-density regions. Based on this intuition, we propose two
novel models: 1) the Virtual Adversarial Domain Adaptation
(VADA) model which incorporates an additional virtual adversarial training BID20 and conditional entropy loss to push the decision boundaries away from the empirical data, and 2) the Decision-boundary Iterative Refinement
Training with a Teacher (DIRT-T) model which uses natural gradients to further refine the output of the VADA model while focusing purely on the target domain. We demonstrate that 1. In conservative domain
adaptation, where the
classifier is trained to perform well on the source domain, VADA can be used to further constrain the hypothesis space by penalizing violations of the cluster assumption, thereby improving domain adversarial training.2. In non-conservative domain adaptation, where
we account for the mismatch between the source and target optimal classifiers, DIRT-T allows us to transition from a joint (source and target) classifier (VADA) to a better target domain classifier. Interestingly, we demonstrate the advantage
of natural gradients in DIRT-T refinement steps.We report results for domain adaptation in digits classification (MNIST-M, MNIST, SYN DIGITS, SVHN), traffic sign classification (SYN SIGNS, GTSRB), general object classification (STL-10, CIFAR-10), and Wi-Fi activity recognition (Yousefi et al., 2017) . We show that, in nearly all experiments, VADA
improves upon previous methods and that DIRT-T improves upon VADA, setting new state-of-the-art performances across a wide range of domain adaptation benchmarks. In adapting MNIST → SVHN, a very challenging
task, we out-perform ATT by over 20%.
In this paper, we presented two novel models for domain adaptation inspired by the cluster assumption.
Our first model, VADA, performs domain adversarial training with an added term that penalizes violations of the cluster assumption.
Our second model, DIRT-T, is an extension of VADA that recursively refines the VADA classifier by untethering the model from the source training signal and applying approximate natural gradients to further minimize the cluster assumption violation.
Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the cluster assumption: VADA achieves strong performance across several domain adaptation benchmarks, and DIRT-T further improves VADA performance.Our proposed models open up several possibilities for future work.
One possibility is to apply DIRT-T to weakly supervised learning; another is to improve the natural gradient approximation via K-FAC BID18 and PPO BID25 .
Given the strong performance of our models, we also recommend them for other downstream domain adaptation applications.
DISPLAYFORM0 Gaussian noise, σ = 1 DISPLAYFORM1 Gaussian noise, σ = 1 DISPLAYFORM2

assistant: text: SOTA on unsupervised domain adaptation by leveraging the cluster assumption.