Universal Domain Adaptation

Kaichao You, Mingsheng Long, Zhangjie Cao, Jianmin Wang, Michael I. Jordan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 2720-2729

Domain adaptation aims to transfer knowledge in the presence of the domain gap. Existing domain adaptation methods rely on rich prior knowledge about the relationship between the label sets of source and target domains, which greatly limits their application in the wild. This paper introduces Universal Domain Adaptation (UDA) that requires no prior knowledge on the label sets. For a given source label set and a target label set, they may contain a common label set and hold a private label set respectively, bringing up an additional category gap. UDA requires a model to either (1) classify the target sample correctly if it is associated with a label in the common label set, or (2) mark it as "unknown" otherwise. More importantly, a UDA model should work stably against a wide spectrum of commonness (the proportion of the common label set over the complete label set) so that it can handle real-world problems with unknown target label sets. To solve the universal domain adaptation problem, we propose Universal Adaptation Network (UAN). It quantifies sample-level transferability to discover the common label set and the label sets private to each domain, thereby promoting the adaptation in the automatically discovered common label set and recognizing the "unknown" samples successfully. A thorough evaluation shows that UAN outperforms the state of the art closed set, partial and open set domain adaptation methods in the novel UDA setting.