Towards Better Robustness against Common Corruptions for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Zhiqiang Gao, Kaizhu Huang, Rui Zhang, Dawei Liu, Jieming Ma; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 18882-18893

Recent studies have investigated how to achieve robustness for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). While most efforts focus on adversarial robustness, i.e. how the model performs against unseen malicious adversarial perturbations, robustness against benign common corruption (RaCC) surprisingly remains under-explored for UDA. Towards improving RaCC for UDA methods in an unsupervised manner, we propose a novel Distributionally and Discretely Adversarial Regularization (DDAR) framework in this paper. Formulated as a min-max optimization with a distribution distance, DDAR is theoretically well-founded to ensure generalization over unknown common corruptions. Meanwhile, we show that our regularization scheme effectively reduces a surrogate of RaCC, i.e., the perceptual distance between natural data and common corruption. To enable a better adversarial regularization, the design of the optimization pipeline relies on an image discretization scheme that can transform "out-of-distribution" adversarial data into "in-distribution" data augmentation. Through extensive experiments, in terms of RaCC, our method is superior to conventional unsupervised regularization mechanisms, widely improves the robustness of existing UDA methods, and achieves state-of-the-art performance.