Minimizing Outputs’ Differences of Classifiers with Different Responsibilities for Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation

The adversarial domain adaptation has made many achievements in the field of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA). However, initial adversarial domain adaptation methods do not consider the category-level domain adaptation, causing confusion between different categories in the different domains. This paper propose a UDA approach called Minimizing Outputs' Differences of Classifiers with Different Responsibilities (MODCDR) to improve this situation. Its framework consists of one generator and two different task-specific classifiers, one working on the source domain, while the other working on the target domain. By training the feature generator to minimize the outputs' discrepancy of these two classifiers, this method not only generates discriminative features, but also achieves the category-level feature distribution alignment simultaneously. In addition, these two classifiers can also produce and filter the reliable pseudo-labels on the target domain, being used for assisting our training. This paper tested this method on three publicly available transfer learning object recognition datasets, with comparison to recent unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation approaches. The results show that the proposed method has superior performance.