Domain adaptation is crucial in many real-world applications where the distribution of the training data differs from the distribution of the test data. Previous Deep Learning-based approaches to domain adaptation need to be trained jointly on source and target domain data and are therefore unappealing in scenarios where models need to be adapted to a large number of domains or where a domain is evolving, e.g. spam detection where attackers continuously change their tactics. @PARASPLIT To fill this gap, we propose Knowledge Adaptation, an extension of Knowledge Distillation (, 2006; , 2015) to the domain adaptation scenario. We show how a student model achieves state-of-the-art results on unsupervised domain adaptation from multiple sources on a standard sentiment analysis benchmark by taking into account the domain-specific expertise of multiple teachers and the similarities between their domains. @PARASPLIT When learning from a single teacher, using domain similarity to gauge trustworthiness is inadequate. To this end, we propose a simple metric that correlates well with the teacher's accuracy in the target domain. We demonstrate that incorporating high-confidence examples selected by this metric enables the student model to achieve state-of-the-art performance in the single-source scenario.
Deep learning-based approaches to domain adaptation are more recent and have focused mainly on learning domain-invariant representations: Glorot2011a first employed stacked Denoising Auto-encoders (SDA) to extract meaningful representations. Chen2012 in turn extended SDA to marginalized SDA by addressing SDA's high computational cost and lack of scalability to high-dimensional features, while Zhuang2015 proposed to use deep auto-encoders for transfer learning. @cite_17 added a Gradient Reversal Layer that hinders the model's ability to discriminate between domains. Finally, Zhou2016 transferred the source examples to the target domain and vice versa using Bi-Transferring Deep Neural Networks, while Bousmalis2016 propose Domain Separation Networks. All of these approaches, however, require to jointly train the model on source and target data for every new target domain.
@cite_17
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We introduce a new representation learning approach for domain adaptation, in which data at training and test time come from similar but different distributions. Our approach is directly inspired by the theory on domain adaptation suggesting that, for effective domain transfer to be achieved, predictions must be made based on features that cannot discriminate between the training (source) and test (target) domains. The approach implements this idea in the context of neural network architectures that are trained on labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain (no labeled target-domain data is necessary). As the training progresses, the approach promotes the emergence of features that are (i) discriminative for the main learning task on the source domain and (ii) indiscriminate with respect to the shift between the domains. We show that this adaptation behaviour can be achieved in almost any feed-forward model by augmenting it with few standard layers and a new gradient reversal layer. The resulting augmented architecture can be trained using standard backpropagation and stochastic gradient descent, and can thus be implemented with little effort using any of the deep learning packages. We demonstrate the success of our approach for two distinct classification problems (document sentiment analysis and image classification), where state-of-the-art domain adaptation performance on standard benchmarks is achieved. We also validate the approach for descriptor learning task in the context of person re-identification application.