Guiding Pseudo-labels with Uncertainty Estimation for Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Standard Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) methods assume the availability of both source and target data during the adaptation. In this work, we investigate Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SF-UDA), a specific case of UDA where a model is adapted to a target domain without access to source data. We propose a novel approach for the SF-UDA setting based on a loss reweighting strategy that brings robustness against the noise that inevitably affects the pseudo-labels. The classification loss is reweighted based on the reliability of the pseudo-labels that is measured by estimating their uncertainty. Guided by such reweighting strategy, the pseudo-labels are progressively refined by aggregating knowledge from neighbouring samples. Furthermore, a self-supervised contrastive framework is leveraged as a target space regulariser to enhance such knowledge aggregation. A novel negative pairs exclusion strategy is proposed to identify and exclude negative pairs made of samples sharing the same class, even in presence of some noise in the pseudo-labels. Our method outperforms previous methods on three major benchmarks by a large margin. We set the new SF-UDA state-of-the-art on VisDA-C and DomainNet with a performance gain of + 1.8% on both benchmarks and on PACS with + 12.3% in the single-source setting and +6.6% in multi-target adaptation. Additional analyses demonstrate that the proposed approach is robust to the noise, which results in significantly more accurate pseudo-labels compared to state-of-the-art approaches.