CA-UDA: Class-Aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Optimal Assignment and Pseudo-Label Refinement

Abstract

Recent works on unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) focus on the selection of good pseudo-labels as surrogates for the missing labels in the target data. However, source domain bias that deteriorates the pseudo-labels can still exist since the shared network of the source and target domains are typically used for the pseudo-label selections. The suboptimal feature space source-to-target domain alignment can also result in unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose CA-UDA to improve the quality of the pseudo-labels and UDA results with optimal assignment, a pseudo-label refinement strategy and class-aware domain alignment. We use an auxiliary network to mitigate the source domain bias for pseudo-label refinement. Our intuition is that the underlying semantics in the target domain can be fully exploited to help refine the pseudo-labels that are inferred from the source features under domain shift. Furthermore, our optimal assignment can optimally align features in the source-to-target domains and our class-aware domain alignment can simultaneously close the domain gap while preserving the classification decision boundaries. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance in the image classification task.