Knowledge Preserving and Distribution Alignment for Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation

Abstract

Domain adaptation aims at improving the performance of learning tasks in a target domain by leveraging the knowledge extracted from a source domain. To this end, one can perform knowledge transfer between these two domains. However, this problem becomes extremely challenging when the data of these two domains are characterized by different types of features, i.e., the feature spaces of the source and target domains are different, which is referred to as heterogeneous domain adaptation (HDA). To solve this problem, we propose a novel model called Knowledge Preserving and Distribution Alignment (KPDA), which learns an augmented target space by jointly minimizing information loss and maximizing domain distribution alignment. Specifically, we seek to discover a latent space, where the knowledge is preserved by exploiting the Laplacian graph terms and reconstruction regularizations. Moreover, we adopt the Maximum Mean Discrepancy to align the distributions of the source and target domains in the latent space. Mathematically, KPDA is formulated as a minimization problem with orthogonal constraints, which involves two projection variables. Then, we develop an algorithm based on the Gauss–Seidel iteration scheme and split the problem into two subproblems, which are solved by searching algorithms based on the Barzilai–Borwein (BB) stepsize. Promising results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.