Target-agnostic Source-free Domain Adaptation for Regression Tasks

Tianlang He, Zhiqiu Xia, Jierun Chen, Haoliang Li, S.-H. Gary Chan

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) seeks to bridge the domain gap between the target and source using unlabeled target data. Source-free UDA removes the requirement for labeled source data at the target to preserve data privacy and storage. However, previous works on source-free UDA assume knowledge of domain gap, and hence is limited to either target-aware or classification task. To overcome it, we propose TASFAR, a novel target-agnostic source-free domain adaptation approach for regression tasks. Using prediction confidence, TASFAR estimates a label density map as the target label distribution, which is then used to calibrate the source model on the target domain. We have conducted extensive experiments on four regression tasks with various domain gaps, namely, pedestrian dead reckoning for different users, image-based people counting in different scenes, housing-price prediction at different districts, and taxi-trip duration prediction from different departure points. TASFAR demonstrates significant superiority over state-of-the-art source-free UDA approaches, achieving an average error reduction of 22 % across the four tasks and comparable accuracy to source-based UDA, all without relying on source data.