Independent Feature Decomposition and Instance Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Existing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) methods typically attempt to perform knowledge transfer in a domain-invariant space explicitly or implicitly. In practice, however, the obtained features are often mixed with domain-specific information which causes performance degradation. To overcome this fundamental limitation, this article presents a novel independent feature decomposition and instance alignment method (IndUDA in short). Specifically, based on an invertible flow, we project the base feature into a decomposed latent space with domain-invariant and domain specific dimensions. To drive semantic decomposition independently, we then swap the domain invariant part across source and target domain samples with the same category and require their inverted features are consistent in class-level with the original features. By treating domain-specific information as noise, we replace it by Gaussian noise and further regularize source model training by instance alignment, i.e., requiring the base features close to the corresponding reconstructed features, respectively. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on popular UDA benchmarks. The appendix and code are available at https://github.com/ayombeach/IndUDA.