Coupled Knowledge Transfer for Visual Data Recognition

Min Meng, Mengcheng Lan, Jun Yu, Jigang Wu

Abstract: Transfer learning aims to learn an effective classifier for unlabeled target data by borrowing knowledge from well-labeled source data. However, most existing work has emphasized on learning domain invariant features to reduce the distribution discrepancy, which may suffer from the negative transfer problem caused by structure inconsistencies or distribution outliers. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach, which seamlessly integrates domain invariant feature learning, discriminative structure preservation and sample reweighting into a unified learning model. Specifically, we attempt to learn domain invariant features by jointly adapting the marginal and conditional distributions. To transfer discriminative knowledge inferred from data, we enforce the structure consistency between the original feature space and the latent feature space. Furthermore, to enhance the robustness of our model, an efficient and more generalized sample reweighting strategy is developed to assign target predictions with different levels of confidence. The key advantage over previous methods is that our model can adaptively select pivot samples in target domain and retain the properties of discriminative structures underlying data domains, which enables coupled knowledge transfer during the learning process. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets have verified the superiority of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art algorithms.