Unsupervised Cross Domain Distance Metric Adaptation with Feature Transfer Network

Publication Date: 10/11/2018

Event: BayLearn Symposium 2018, Menlo Park, CA USA

Reference: pp 1-13, 2018

Authors: Kihyuk Sohn, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Wenling Shang, University of Amsterdam; Xiang Yu, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.; Manmohan Chandraker, NEC Laboratories America, Inc.

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation is an attractive avenue to enhance the performance of deep neural networks in a target domain, using labels only from a source domain. However, two predominant methods along this line, namely, domain divergence reduction learning and semi-supervised learning, are not readily applicable when the source and target domains do not share a common label space. This paper addresses the above scenario by learning a representation space that retains discriminative power on both the (labeled) source and (unlabeled) target domains while keeping the representations for the two domains well-separated. Inspired by a theoretical error bound on the target domain, we first reformulate the disjoint classification, where the source and target domains correspond to non-overlapping class labels, to a verification task. To handle both within-domain and cross-domain verification tasks, we propose a Feature Transfer Network (FTN) that separates the target features from the source features while simultaneously aligning the target features with a transformed source feature space. Moreover, we present a non-parametric variation of multi-class entropy minimization loss to further boost the discriminative power of FTNs on the target domain. In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of FTNs through state-of-the-art performances on a cross-ethnicity face recognition problem.

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