Transfer Feature Learning with Joint Distribution Adaptation

Mingsheng Long, Jianmin Wang, Guiguang Ding, Jiaguang Sun, Philip S. Yu; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 2200-2207

Transfer learning is established as an effective technology in computer vision for leveraging rich labeled data in the source domain to build an accurate classifier for the target domain. However, most prior methods have not simultaneously reduced the difference in both the marginal distribution and conditional distribution between domains. In this paper, we put forward a novel transfer learning approach, referred to as Joint Distribution Adaptation (JDA). Specifically, JDA aims to jointly adapt both the marginal distribution and conditional distribution in a principled dimensionality reduction procedure, and construct new feature representation that is effective and robust for substantial distribution difference. Extensive experiments verify that JDA can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art methods on four types of cross-domain image classification problems.