Mining Label Distribution Drift in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation targets to transfer task knowledge from labeled source domain to related yet unlabeled target domain, and is catching extensive interests from academic and industrial areas. Although tremendous efforts along this direction have been made to minimize the domain divergence, unfortunately, most of existing methods only manage part of the picture by aligning feature representations from different domains. Beyond the discrepancy in feature space, the gap between known source label and unknown target label distribution, recognized as label distribution drift, is another crucial factor raising domain divergence, and has not been paid enough attention and well explored. From this point, in this paper, we first experimentally reveal how label distribution drift brings negative effects on current domain adaptation methods. Next, we propose Label distribution Matching Domain Adversarial Network (LMDAN) to handle data distribution shift and label distribution drift jointly. In LMDAN, label distribution drift problem is addressed by the proposed source samples weighting strategy, which select samples to contribute to positive adaptation and avoid negative effects brought by the mismatched in label distribution. Finally, different from general domain adaptation experiments, we modify domain adaptation datasets to create the considerable label distribution drift between source and target domain. Numerical results and empirical model analysis show that LMDAN delivers superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods under such scenarios.