Towards Uncovering the Intrinsic Data Structures for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation using Structurally Regularized Deep Clustering



Hui Tang1
Xiatian Zhu2
Ke Chen1
Kui Jia ✉, 1
C. L. Philip Chen1

South China University of Technology1
University of Surrey2
Corresponding author
Code [GitHub]
Paper [arXiv]
Cite [BibTeX]


Teaser

We are motivated by a Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) assumption of structural similarity across domains, and propose to directly uncover the intrinsic target discrimination via constrained clustering, where we constrain the clustering solutions using structural source regularization that hinges on the very same assumption. Technically, we propose a hybrid model of Structurally Regularized Deep Clustering, which integrates the regularized discriminative clustering of target data with a generative one, and we thus term our method as H-SRDC.



Abstract

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is to learn classification models that make predictions for unlabeled data on a target domain, given labeled data on a source domain whose distribution diverges from the target one. Mainstream UDA methods strive to learn domain-aligned features such that classifiers trained on the source features can be readily applied to the target ones. Although impressive results have been achieved, these methods have a potential risk of damaging the intrinsic data structures of target discrimination, raising an issue of generalization particularly for UDA tasks in an inductive setting. To address this issue, we are motivated by a UDA assumption of structural similarity across domains, and propose to directly uncover the intrinsic target discrimination via constrained clustering, where we constrain the clustering solutions using structural source regularization that hinges on the very same assumption. Technically, we propose a hybrid model of Structurally Regularized Deep Clustering, which integrates the regularized discriminative clustering of target data with a generative one, and we thus term our method as H-SRDC. Our hybrid model is based on a deep clustering framework that minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the distribution of network prediction and an auxiliary one, where we impose structural regularization by learning domain-shared classifier and cluster centroids. By enriching the structural similarity assumption, we are able to extend H-SRDC for a pixel-level UDA task of semantic segmentation. We conduct extensive experiments on seven UDA benchmarks of image classification and semantic segmentation. With no explicit feature alignment, our proposed H-SRDC outperforms all the existing methods under both the inductive and transductive settings.



BibTeX

  	
@article{tang2021towards,
  author={Tang, Hui and Zhu, Xiatian and Chen, Ke and Jia, Kui and Chen, C. L. Philip},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence}, 
  title={Towards Uncovering the Intrinsic Data Structures for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Using Structurally Regularized Deep Clustering}, 
  year={2022},
  volume={44},
  number={10},
  pages={6517-6533},
  doi={10.1109/TPAMI.2021.3087830}
}
  	
      


Acknowledgements

Based on a template by Keyan Chen.