Joint weight optimization for partial domain adaptation via kernel statistical distance estimation

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The goal of Partial Domain Adaptation (PDA) is to transfer a neural network from a source domain (joint source distribution) to a distinct target domain (joint target distribution), where the source label space subsumes the target label space. To address the PDA problem, existing works have proposed to learn the marginal source weights to match the weighted marginal source distribution to the marginal target distribution. However, this is sub-optimal, since the neural network’s target performance is concerned with the joint distribution disparity, not the marginal distribution disparity. In this paper, we propose a Joint Weight Optimization (JWO) approach that optimizes the joint source weights to match the weighted joint source distribution to the joint target distribution in the neural network’s feature space. To measure the joint distribution disparity, we exploit two statistical distances: the distribution-difference-based L2-distance and the distribution-ratio-based χ2-divergence. Since these two distances are unknown in practice, we propose a Kernel Statistical Distance Estimation (KSDE) method to estimate them from the weighted source data and the target data. Our KSDE method explicitly expresses the two estimated statistical distances as functions of the joint source weights. Therefore, we can optimize the joint weights to minimize the estimated distance functions and reduce the joint distribution disparity. Finally, we achieve the PDA goal by training the neural network on the weighted source data. Experiments on several popular datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Intro video and Pytorch code are available at https://github.com/sentaochen/Joint-Weight-Optimation. Interested readers can also visit https://github.com/sentaochen for more source codes of the related domain adaptation, multi-source domain adaptation, and domain generalization approaches.