SIDE: Self-supervised Intermediate Domain Exploration for Source-free Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation aims to alleviate the domain shift when transferring the knowledge learned from the source domain to the target domain. Due to privacy issues, source-free domain adaptation (SFDA), where source data is unavailable during adaptation, has recently become very demanding yet challenging. Existing SFDA methods focus on either self-supervised learning of target samples or reconstruction of virtual source data. The former overlooks the transferable knowledge in the source model, whilst the latter introduces even more uncertainty. To address the above issues, this paper proposes self-supervised intermediate domain exploration (SIDE) that effectively bridges the domain gap with an intermediate domain, where samples are cyclically filtered out in a self-supervised fashion. First, we propose cycle intermediate domain filtering (CIDF) to cyclically select intermediate samples with similar distributions over source and target domains. Second, with the aid of those intermediate samples, an inter-domain gap transition (IDGT) module is developed to mitigate possible distribution mismatches between the source and target data. Finally, we introduce cross-view consistency learning (CVCL) to maintain the intrinsic class discriminability whilst adapting the model to the target domain. Extensive experiments on three popular benchmarks, i.e. Office-31, Office-Home and VisDA-C, show that our proposed SIDE achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods.