ECACL: A Holistic Framework for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation

Kai Li, Chang Liu, Handong Zhao, Yulun Zhang, Yun Fu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 8578-8587

This paper studies Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA), a practical yet under-investigated research topic that aims to learn a model of good performance using unlabeled samples and a few labeled samples in the target domain, with the help of labeled samples from a source domain. Several SSDA methods have been proposed recently, which however fail to fully exploit the value of the few labeled target samples. In this paper, we propose Enhanced Categorical Alignment and Consistency Learning (ECACL), a holistic SSDA framework that incorporates multiple mutually complementary domain alignment techniques. ECACL includes two categorical domain alignment techniques that achieve class-level alignment, a strong data augmentation based technique that enhances the model's generalizability and a consistency learning based technique that forces the model to be robust with image perturbations. These techniques are applied on one or multiple of the three inputs (labeled source, unlabeled target, and labeled target) and align the domains from different perspectives. ECACL unifies them together and achieves fairly comprehensive domain alignments that are much better than the existing methods: For example, ECACL raises the state-of-the-art accuracy from 68.4 to 81.1 on VisDA2017 and from 45.5 to 53.4 on DomainNet for the 1-shot setting. Our code is available at https://github.com/kailigo/pacl.