Domain adaptation techniques address the problem of reducing the sensitivity of machine learning methods to the so-called domain shift, namely the difference between source (training) and target (test) data distributions. In particular, unsupervised domain adaptation assumes no labels are available in the target domain. To this end, aligning second order statistics (covariances) of target and source domains have proven to be an effective approach ti fill the gap between the domains. However, covariance matrices do not form a subspace of the Euclidean space, but live in a Riemannian manifold with non-positive curvature, making the usual Euclidean metric suboptimal to measure distances. In this paper, we extend the idea of training a neural network with a constraint on the covariances of the hidden layer features, by rigorously accounting for the curved structure of the manifold of symmetric positive definite matrices. The resulting loss function exploits a theoretically sound geodesic distance on such manifold. Results show indeed the suboptimal nature of the Euclidean distance. This makes us able to perform better than previous approaches on the standard Office dataset, a benchmark for domain adaptation techniques.
Last worth to mention is Batch Normalization @cite_26 , recently revisited under a specific domain adaptation perspective @cite_14 . The idea is quite similar in spirit to the idea of aligning second order statistics. However Batch Normalization tries to compensate for the source's internal covariance shift by normalizing each mini-batch to be zero-mean and unit variance (whitening), while not taking into account target's statistics: layer's activation are decorrelated for the source data, but not for target points.
@cite_14 @cite_26
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While the authors of Batch Normalization (BN) identify and address an important problem involved in training deep networks-- Internal Covariate Shift-- the current solution has certain drawbacks. Specifically, BN depends on batch statistics for layerwise input normalization during training which makes the estimates of mean and standard deviation of input (distribution) to hidden layers inaccurate for validation due to shifting parameter values (especially during initial training epochs). Also, BN cannot be used with batch-size 1 during training. We address these drawbacks by proposing a non-adaptive normalization technique for removing internal covariate shift, that we call Normalization Propagation. Our approach does not depend on batch statistics, but rather uses a data-independent parametric estimate of mean and standard-deviation in every layer thus being computationally faster compared with BN. We exploit the observation that the pre-activation before Rectified Linear Units follow Gaussian distribution in deep networks, and that once the first and second order statistics of any given dataset are normalized, we can forward propagate this normalization without the need for recalculating the approximate statistics for hidden layers. While the authors of Batch Normalization (BN) identify and address an important problem involved in training deep networks- Internal Covariate Shift- the current solution has certain drawbacks. For instance, BN depends on batch statistics for layerwise input normalization during training which makes the estimates of mean and standard deviation of input (distribution) to hidden layers inaccurate due to shifting parameter values (especially during initial training epochs). Another fundamental problem with BN is that it cannot be used with batch-size 1 during training. We address these drawbacks of BN by proposing a non-adaptive normalization technique for removing covariate shift, that we call Normalization Propagation. Our approach does not depend on batch statistics, but rather uses a data-independent parametric estimate of mean and standard-deviation in every layer thus being computationally faster compared with BN. We exploit the observation that the pre-activation before Rectified Linear Units follow Gaussian distribution in deep networks, and that once the first and second order statistics of any given dataset are normalized, we can forward propagate this normalization without the need for recalculating the approximate statistics for hidden layers.