Assisted Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Cheng Chen, Jiawei Zhang, Jie Ding, Yi Zhou

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a popular machine learning technique that allows one to train models over diverse data collected from different domains. However, this technique requires the learner to collect a large number of properly labeled data samples, which can be costly and unrealistic in many applications. In this work, we propose a decentralized assisted learning framework for UDA. In this framework, a learner has only a limited number of labeled data samples collected from a certain source domain and aims to train a classifier for the target domain. To improve domain adaptation performance, it seeks assistance by interacting with an external service provider, who possesses many labeled data samples collected from a related source domain. We develop an assisted UDA algorithm that avoids data sharing and can significantly improve the learner’s domain adaptation performance within a few rounds of interaction. Experiments using deep neural networks on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm.