Metrics for Domain Shift Characterization: Comparisons and New Directions

Abstract

Domain adaptation is an important area of research, as it aims to remedy the effects of the domain shift due to differences in the distribution between the source domain used for training and the target domain where prediction takes place. However, methods for characterizing the domain shift across datasets are lacking. In this work, we propose a domain shift metric called SpOT, which stands for spherical optimal transport, by operating on the spherical manifold. We realize our approach with a spherical network, used to obtain features, and an orthogonal projection loss, used to impose orthogonality in the feature space. The resulting spherical features have better inter-class separation and lower intra-class variation compared to features in Euclidean space. This type of feature clustering makes each domain representation more compact and more suitable for further analysis. The domain shift between the datasets is calculated using the optimal transport on the spherical features, which has a sound theoretical basis. Our results are further supported by experiments that show the correlation of SpOT with a new gain of transfer measure across domain adaptation datasets.