A Unified Framework for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation based on Instance Weighting

Despite the progress made in domain adaptation, solving Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) problems with a general method under complex conditions caused by label shifts between domains remains a formidable task. In this work, we comprehensively investigate four distinct UDA settings including closed set domain adaptation, partial domain adaptation, open set domain adaptation, and universal domain adaptation, where shared common classes between source and target domains coexist alongside domain-specific private classes. The prominent challenges inherent in diverse UDA settings center around the discrimination of common/private classes and the precise measurement of domain discrepancy. To surmount these challenges effectively, we propose a novel yet effective method called Learning Instance Weighting for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (LIWUDA), which caters to various UDA settings. Specifically, the proposed LIWUDA method constructs a weight network to assign weights to each instance based on its probability of belonging to common classes, and designs Weighted Optimal Transport (WOT) for domain alignment by leveraging instance weights. Additionally, the proposed LIWUDA method devises a Separate and Align (SA) loss to separate instances with low similarities and align instances with high similarities. To guide the learning of the weight network, Intra-domain Optimal Transport (IOT) is proposed to enforce the weights of instances in common classes to follow a uniform distribution. Through the integration of those three components, the proposed LIWUDA method demonstrates its capability to address all four UDA settings in a unified manner. Experimental evaluations conducted on three benchmark datasets substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed LIWUDA method.