EMTL: A Generative Domain Adaptation Approach

Jianfeng Zhang, Illyyne Saffar, Aladin Virmaux, Balázs Kégl

Keywords: unsupervised domain adaptation, EM, generative model, density estimation, deep learning, transfer learning

Abstract: We propose an unsupervised domain adaptation approach based on generative models. We show that when the source probability density function can be learned, one-step Expectation–Maximization iteration plus an additional marginal density function constraint will produce a proper mediator probability density function to bridge the gap between the source and target domains. The breakthrough is based on modern generative models (autoregressive mixture density nets) that are competitive to discriminative models on moderate-dimensional classification problems. By decoupling the source density estimation from the adaption steps, we can design a domain adaptation approach where the source data is locked away after being processed only once, opening the door to transfer when data security or privacy concerns impede the use of traditional domain adaptation. We demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance on synthetic and real data sets, without accessing the source data at the adaptation phase.

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Reviewed Version (pdf): https://openreview.net/references/pdf?id=B5erNvhMs