Collaborative Training of Balanced Random Forests for Open Set Domain Adaptation

Jongbin Ryu, Jiun Bae, Jongwoo Lim

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a collaborative training algorithm of balanced random forests for domain adaptation tasks which can avoid the overfitting problem. In real scenarios, most domain adaptation algorithms face the challenges from noisy, insufficient training data. Moreover in open set categorization, unknown or misaligned source and target categories adds difficulty. In such cases, conventional methods suffer from overfitting and fail to successfully transfer the knowledge of the source to the target domain. To address these issues, the following two techniques are proposed. First, we introduce the optimized decision tree construction method, in which the data at each node are split into equal sizes while maximizing the information gain. Compared to the conventional random forests, it generates larger and more balanced decision trees due to the even-split constraint, which contributes to enhanced discrimination power and reduced overfitting. Second, to tackle the domain misalignment problem, we propose the domain alignment loss which penalizes uneven splits of the source and target domain data. By collaboratively optimizing the information gain of the labeled source data as well as the entropy of unlabeled target data distributions, the proposed CoBRF algorithm achieves significantly better performance than the state-of-the-art methods. The proposed algorithm is extensively evaluated in various experimental setups in challenging domain adaptation tasks with noisy and small training data as well as open set domain adaptation problems, for two backbone networks of AlexNet and ResNet-50.