Transferable Discriminative Feature Mining For Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to seek an effective model for unlabeled target domain by leveraging knowledge from a labeled source domain with a related but different distribution. Many existing approaches ignore the underlying discriminative features of the target data and the discrepancy of conditional distributions. To address these two issues simultaneously, the paper presents a Transferable Discriminative Feature Mining (TDFM) approach for UDA, which can naturally unify the mining of domain-invariant discriminative features and the alignment of class-wise features into one single framework. To be specific, to achieve the domain-invariant discriminative features, TDFM jointly learns a shared encoding representation for two tasks: supervised classification of labeled source data, and discriminative clustering of unlabeled target data. It then conducts the class-wise alignment by decreasing intra-class variations and increasing inter-class differences across domains, encouraging the emergence of transferable discriminative features. When combined, these two procedures are mutually beneficial. Comprehensive experiments verify that TDFM can obtain remarkable margins over state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods.