Seeing Beyond Labels: Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Hypothesis Consolidation of Prediction Rationale
Abstract: Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SFUDA) is a challenging task where a model needs to be adapted to a new domain without access to target domain labels or source domain data. The primary difficulty in this task is that the model's predictions may be inaccurate, and using these inaccurate predictions for model adaptation can lead to misleading results. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel approach that considers multiple prediction hypotheses for each sample and investigates the rationale behind each hypothesis. By consolidating these hypothesis rationales, we identify the most likely correct hypotheses, which we then use as a pseudo-labeled set to support a semi-supervised learning procedure for model adaptation. This approach distinguishes itself from conventional semi-supervised learning by relying solely on pseudo-labels rather than ground-truth annotations. To achieve the optimal performance, we propose a three-step adaptation process: model pre-adaptation, hypothesis consolidation, and semi-supervised learning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in the SFUDA task and can be easily integrated into existing approaches to improve their performance.
Submission Length: Long submission (more than 12 pages of main content)
Assigned Action Editor: ~Soma_Biswas1
Submission Number: 3997
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