Interactive Residual Domain Adaptation Networks for Partial Transfer Industrial Fault Diagnosis

The partial domain adaptation (PDA) challenge is a prevalent issue in industrial fault diagnosis. Current PDA approaches primarily rely on adversarial learning for domain adaptation and use reweighting strategies to exclude source samples deemed outliers. However, the transferability of features diminishes from general feature extraction layers to higher task-specific layers in adversarial learning-based adaptation modules, leading to significant negative transfer in PDA settings. We term this issue the adaptation-discrimination paradox (ADP). Furthermore, reweighting strategies often suffer from unreliable pseudo-labels, compromising their effectiveness. Drawing inspiration from traditional classification settings where such partial challenge is not a concern, we propose a novel PDA framework called Interactive Residual Domain Adaptation Networks (IRDAN), which introduces domain-wise models for each domain to provide a new perspective for the PDA challenge. Each domain-wise model is equipped with a residual domain adaptation (RDA) block to mitigate the ADP problem. Additionally, we introduce a confident information flow via an interactive learning strategy, training the modules of IRDAN sequentially to avoid cross-interference. We also establish a reliable stopping criterion for selecting the best-performing model, ensuring practical usability in real-world applications. Experiments have demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed IRDAN.