CANN

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods aim to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Most existing UDA methods try to learn domain-invariant features so that the classifier trained by the source labels can automatically be adapted to the target domain. However, recent works have shown the limitations of these methods when label distributions differ between the source and target domains. Especially, in partial domain adaptation (PDA) where the source domain holds plenty of individual labels (private labels) not appeared in the target domain, the domain-invariant features can cause catastrophic performance degradation. In this paper, based on the originally favorable underlying structures of the two domains, we learn two kinds of target features, i.e., the source-approximate features and target-approximate features instead of the domain-invariant features. The source-approximate features utilize the consistency of the two domains to estimate the distribution of the source private labels. The target-approximate features enhance the feature discrimination in the target domain while detecting the hard (outlier) target samples. A novel Coupled Approximation Neural Network (CANN) has been proposed to co-train the source-approximate and target-approximate features by two parallel sub-networks without sharing the parameters. We apply CANN to three prevalent transfer learning benchmark datasets, Office-Home, Office-31, and Visda2017 with both UDA and PDA settings. The results show that CANN outperforms all baselines by a large margin in PDA and also performs best in UDA.