Subspace-based Feature Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Abstract

Autonomous agents need to perceive the world in a robust way, such that the shift in data distribution does not lead to faulty perception results. When agents cannot be trained with abundant data, agents may need to operate on real world environments while trained on simulated data, and suffer from domain shift. This paper proposes an effective and robust unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method that can resolve these situations. In the UDA setup, we are given a labeled source domain and an unlabeled target domain that share the same set of classes but are sampled from different distributions. This domain shift prevents agents which employ deep neural networks from generalizing well on the target domain. Recent methods adopt the strategy of self-training the networks with pseudo labeled target samples. However, falsely labeled samples cause negative transfer and deteriorate generalization of a network. to reduce negative transfer we propose an algorithm that can filter the pseudo labels, and use the filtered labels to align the domains in the feature space. The samples whose labels have not passed the filtering process can be used as an index to tune the hyperparameters of our method. Across various benchmarks, we validate the performance of our method. Especially, our method achieves strong performance on the synthetic-to-real adaptation scenario.