Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in the Wild: Dealing with Asymmetric Label Sets

The goal of domain adaptation is to adapt models learned on a source domain to a particular target domain. Most methods for unsupervised domain adaptation proposed in the literature to date, assume that the set of classes present in the target domain is identical to the set of classes present in the source domain. This is a restrictive assumption that limits the practical applicability of unsupervised domain adaptation techniques in real world settings (“in the wild”). Therefore, we relax this constraint and propose a technique that allows the set of target classes to be a subset of the source classes. This way, large publicly available annotated datasets with a wide variety of classes can be used as source, even if the actual set of classes in target can be more limited and, maybe most importantly, unknown beforehand. To this end, we propose an algorithm that orders a set of source subspaces that are relevant to the target classification problem. Our method then chooses a restricted set from this ordered set of source subspaces. As an extension, even starting from multiple source datasets with varied sets of categories, this method automatically selects an appropriate subset of source categories relevant to a target dataset. Empirical analysis on a number of source and target domain datasets shows that restricting the source subspace to only a subset of categories does indeed substantially improve the eventual target classification accuracy over the baseline that considers all source classes.