Contrastive Bi-Projector for Unsupervised Domain Adaption

TL;DR

This paper introduces a contrastive bi-projector approach for unsupervised domain adaptation that enhances feature discrimination and reduces ambiguity, leading to improved classification performance across various tasks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel contrastive bi-projector framework with a new loss function and gradient scaling scheme to improve UDA effectiveness and stability.

Findings

CBPUDA outperforms conventional UDA methods

The contrastive discrepancy loss enhances feature compactness and separability

The gradient scaling scheme stabilizes training with contrastive and adversarial learning

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel unsupervised domain adaption (UDA) method based on contrastive bi-projector (CBP), which can improve the existing UDA methods. It is called CBPUDA here, which effectively promotes the feature extractors (FEs) to reduce the generation of ambiguous features for classification and domain adaption. The CBP differs from traditional bi-classifier-based methods at that these two classifiers are replaced with two projectors of performing a mapping from the input feature to two distinct features. These two projectors and the FEs in the CBPUDA can be trained adversarially to obtain more refined decision boundaries so that it can possess powerful classification performance. Two properties of the proposed loss function are analyzed here. The first property is to derive an upper bound of joint prediction entropy, which is used to form the proposed loss function, contrastive discrepancy (CD) loss. The CD loss takes the advantages of the contrastive learning and the bi-classifier. The second property is to analyze the gradient of the CD loss and then overcome the drawback of the CD loss. The result of the second property is utilized in the development of the gradient scaling (GS) scheme in this paper. The GS scheme can be exploited to tackle the unstable problem of the CD loss because training the CBPUDA requires using contrastive learning and adversarial learning at the same time. Therefore, using the CD loss with the GS scheme overcomes the problem mentioned above to make features more compact for intra-class and distinguishable for inter-class. Experimental results express that the CBPUDA is superior to conventional UDA methods under consideration in this paper for UDA and fine-grained UDA tasks.