A Review of Domain Adaptation without Target Labels

IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. 2021 Mar;43(3):766-785. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2019.2945942. Epub 2021 Feb 4.

Abstract

Domain adaptation has become a prominent problem setting in machine learning and related fields. This review asks the question: How can a classifier learn from a source domain and generalize to a target domain? We present a categorization of approaches, divided into, what we refer to as, sample-based, feature-based, and inference-based methods. Sample-based methods focus on weighting individual observations during training based on their importance to the target domain. Feature-based methods revolve around on mapping, projecting, and representing features such that a source classifier performs well on the target domain and inference-based methods incorporate adaptation into the parameter estimation procedure, for instance through constraints on the optimization procedure. Additionally, we review a number of conditions that allow for formulating bounds on the cross-domain generalization error. Our categorization highlights recurring ideas and raises questions important to further research.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't