In domain adaptation, maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) has been widely adopted as a discrepancy metric between the distributions of source and target domains. However, existing MMD-based domain adaptation methods generally ignore the changes of class prior distributions, i.e., class weight bias across domains. This remains an open problem but ubiquitous for domain adaptation, which can be caused by changes in sample selection criteria and application scenarios. We show that MMD cannot account for class weight bias and results in degraded domain adaptation performance. To address this issue, a weighted MMD model is proposed in this paper. Specifically, we introduce class-specific auxiliary weights into the original MMD for exploiting the class prior probability on source and target domains, whose challenge lies in the fact that the class label in target domain is unavailable. To account for it, our proposed weighted MMD model is defined by introducing an auxiliary weight for each class in the source domain, and a classification EM algorithm is suggested by alternating between assigning the pseudo-labels, estimating auxiliary weights and updating model parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our weighted MMD over conventional MMD for domain adaptation.
Several sample reweighting or selection methods @cite_41 @cite_23 are similar to our weighted MMD in spirit, and have been proposed to match the source and target distributions. These methods aim to learn sample-specific weights or select appropriate source samples for target data. Different from them, our proposed weighted MMD alleviates class weight bias by assigning class-specific weights to source data.
@cite_41 @cite_23
2158815628 2811380766
Learning domain-invariant features is of vital importance to unsupervised domain adaptation, where classifiers trained on the source domain need to be adapted to a different target domain for which no labeled examples are available. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for learning such features. The central idea is to exploit the existence of landmarks, which are a subset of labeled data instances in the source domain that are distributed most similarly to the target domain. Our approach automatically discovers the landmarks and use them to bridge the source to the target by constructing provably easier auxiliary domain adaptation tasks. The solutions of those auxiliary tasks form the basis to compose invariant features for the original task. We show how this composition can be optimized discriminatively without requiring labels from the target domain. We validate the method on standard benchmark datasets for visual object recognition and sentiment analysis of text. Empirical results show the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art significantly. We consider the scenario where training and test data are drawn from different distributions, commonly referred to as sample selection bias. Most algorithms for this setting try to first recover sampling distributions and then make appropriate corrections based on the distribution estimate. We present a nonparametric method which directly produces resampling weights without distribution estimation. Our method works by matching distributions between training and testing sets in feature space. Experimental results demonstrate that our method works well in practice.