Subtype-Aware Dynamic Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a subtype-aware unsupervised domain adaptation method that enhances class-wise and subtype-wise alignment without subtype labels, improving transfer performance across diverse datasets.

Contribution

It proposes a novel adaptive subtype-aware alignment approach utilizing pseudo-labels and a dynamic queue to better capture fine-grained subtype structures in UDA.

Findings

Improves target domain classification accuracy.

Effective across multiple datasets including medical and visual domains.

Outperforms state-of-the-art UDA methods.

Abstract

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been successfully applied to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to target domains without their labels. Recently introduced transferable prototypical networks (TPN) further addresses class-wise conditional alignment. In TPN, while the closeness of class centers between source and target domains is explicitly enforced in a latent space, the underlying fine-grained subtype structure and the cross-domain within-class compactness have not been fully investigated. To counter this, we propose a new approach to adaptively perform a fine-grained subtype-aware alignment to improve performance in the target domain without the subtype label in both domains. The insight of our approach is that the unlabeled subtypes in a class have the local proximity within a subtype, while exhibiting disparate characteristics, because of different conditional and label shifts. Specifically, we propose to simultaneously enforce subtype-wise compactness and class-wise separation, by utilizing intermediate pseudo-labels. In addition, we systematically investigate various scenarios with and without prior knowledge of subtype numbers, and propose to exploit the underlying subtype structure. Furthermore, a dynamic queue framework is developed to evolve the subtype cluster centroids steadily using an alternative processing scheme. Experimental results, carried out with multi-view congenital heart disease data and VisDA and DomainNet, show the effectiveness and validity of our subtype-aware UDA, compared with state-of-the-art UDA methods.