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1. On Learning Invariant Representations for Domain Adaptation

   Han Zhao, Remi Tachet ( January 2019 , Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning)

   Due to the ability of deep neural nets to learn rich representations, recent advances in unsupervised domain adaptation have focused on learning domain-invariant features that achieve a small error on the source domain. The hope is that the learnt representation, together with the hypothesis learnt from the source domain, can generalize to the target domain. In this paper, we first construct a simple counterexample showing that, contrary to common belief, the above conditions are not sufficient to guarantee successful domain adaptation. In particular, the counterexample exhibits conditional shift: the class-conditional distributions of input features change between source and target domains. To give a sufficient condition for domain adaptation, we propose a natural and interpretable generalization upper bound that explicitly takes into account the aforementioned shift.Moreover, we shed new light on the problem by proving an information-theoretic lower bound on the joint error of any domain adaptation method that attempts to learn invariant representations.Our result characterizes a fundamental tradeoff between learning invariant representations and achieving small joint error on both domains when the marginal label distributions differ from source to target. Finally, we conduct experiments on real-world datasets that corroborate our theoretical findings. We believe these insights are helpful in guiding the future design of domain adaptation and representation learning algorithms. 

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2. Graph Domain Adaptation via Theory-Grounded Spectral Regularization

   You, Y. ; Chen, T. ; Wang, Z. ; Shen, Y. ( February 2023 , The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations)

   Transfer learning on graphs drawn from varied distributions (domains) is in great demand across many applications. Emerging methods attempt to learn domain-invariant representations using graph neural networks (GNNs), yet the empirical performances vary and the theoretical foundation is limited. This paper aims at designing theory-grounded algorithms for graph domain adaptation (GDA). (i) As the first attempt, we derive a model-based GDA bound closely related to two GNN spectral properties: spectral smoothness (SS) and maximum frequency response (MFR). This is achieved by cross-pollinating between the OT-based (optimal transport) DA and graph filter theories. (ii) Inspired by the theoretical results, we propose algorithms regularizing spectral properties of SS and MFR to improve GNN transferability. We further extend the GDA theory into the more challenging scenario of conditional shift, where spectral regularization still applies. (iii) More importantly, our analyses of the theory reveal which regularization would improve performance of what transfer learning scenario, (iv) with numerical agreement with extensive real-world experiments: SS and MFR regularizations bring more benefits to the scenarios of node transfer and link transfer, respectively. In a nutshell, our study paves the way toward explicitly constructing and training GNNs that can capture more transferable representations across graph domains. Codes are released at https://github.com/Shen-Lab/GDA-SpecReg. 

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3. Label-Noise Robust Domain Adaptation

   Xiyu Yu, Tongliang Liu ( January 2020 , International Conference on Machine Learning)

   null (Ed.)

   Domain adaptation aims to correct the classifiers when faced with distribution shift between source (training) and target (test) domains. State-of-the-art domain adaptation methods make use of deep networks to extract domain-invariant representations. However, existing methods assume that all the instances in the source domain are correctly labeled; while in reality, it is unsurprising that we may obtain a source domain with noisy labels. In this paper, we are the first to comprehensively investigate how label noise could adversely affect existing domain adaptation methods in various scenarios. Further, we theoretically prove that there exists a method that can essentially reduce the side-effect of noisy source labels in domain adaptation. Specifically, focusing on the generalized target shift scenario, where both label distribution 𝑃𝑌 and the class-conditional distribution 𝑃𝑋|𝑌 can change, we discover that the denoising Conditional Invariant Component (DCIC) framework can provably ensures (1) extracting invariant representations given examples with noisy labels in the source domain and unlabeled examples in the target domain and (2) estimating the label distribution in the target domain with no bias. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. 

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4. AugToAct: scaling complex human activity recognition with few labels

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3360774.3360831  

   Faridee, Abu Zaher ; Khan, Md Abdullah ; Pathak, Nilavra ; Roy, Nirmalya ( November 2019 , 16th ACM/EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (MobiQuitous), 2019)

   Human activity recognition (HAR) from wearable sensor data has recently gained widespread adoption in a number of fields. However, recognizing complex human activities, postural and rhythmic body movements (e.g., dance, sports) is challenging due to the lack of domain-specific labeling information, the perpetual variability in human movement kinematics profiles due to age, sex, dexterity and the level of professional training. In this paper, we propose a deep activity recognition model to work with limited labeled data, both for simple and complex human activities. To mitigate the intra- and inter-user spatio-temporal variability of movements, we posit novel data augmentation and domain normalization techniques. We depict a semi-supervised technique that learns noise and transformation invariant feature representation from sparsely labeled data to accommodate intra-personal and inter-user variations of human movement kinematics. We also postulate a transfer learning approach to learn domain invariant feature representations by minimizing the feature distribution distance between the source and target domains. We showcase the improved performance of our proposed framework, AugToAct, using a public HAR dataset. We also design our own data collection, annotation and experimental setup on complex dance activity recognition steps and kinematics movements where we achieved higher performance metrics with limited label data compared to simple activity recognition tasks. 

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5. Graph Matching and Pseudo-Label Guided Deep Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01424-7_34  

   Das, Debasmit ; Lee, C.S. George ( October 2018 , 2018 27th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks)

   The goal of domain adaptation is to train a high-performance predictive model on the target domain data by using knowledge from the source domain data, which has different but related data distribution. In this paper, we consider unsupervised domain adaptation where we have labelled source domain data but unlabelled target domain data. Our solution to unsupervised domain adaptation is to learn a domain- invariant representation that is also category discriminative. Domain- invariant representations are realized by minimizing the domain discrepancy. To minimize the domain discrepancy, we propose a novel graph- matching metric between the source and target domain representations. Minimizing this metric allows the source and target representations to be in support of each other. We further exploit confident unlabelled target domain samples and their pseudo-labels to refine our proposed model. We expect the refining step to improve the performance further. This is validated by performing experiments on standard image classification adaptation datasets. Results showed our proposed approach out-perform previous domain-invariant representation learning approaches. 

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