Understanding Distribution Alignment Through Category Separability In An Infant-Inspired Domain Adaptation Task

Deepayan Sanyal, Joel Phillips Michelson, Maithilee Kunda

Keywords: domain adaptation, distribution shift, infant learning, self-supervised learning

Abstract: We introduce a novel distribution shift, called the VI-Shift, that mimics the trade-off between object instances and viewpoints in the visual experience of infants. Motivated by findings in infant learning literature, we study this problem through the lens of domain adaptation, but without ImageNet pretraining. We show that the performances of two classic domain adaptation methods, Joint Adaptation Network (JAN) and Domain Adversarial Neural Networks (DANN), deteriorate without ImageNet pretraining. We hypothesize that the separability of source and target category clusters in the feature space plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of JAN. So, we propose 3 metrics to measure category separability and demonstrate that target separability in the pretrained network is strongly correlated with downstream JAN and DANN accuracy. Further, we propose two novel loss functions that increase target separability during pretraining by aligning the distribution of within-domain pairwise distances between the source and target distributions. Our experiments show that the application of these loss functions modestly improves downstream accuracy on unseen images from the target dataset.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Submission Number: 8683