Partial Domain Adaptation Without Domain Alignment

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a well-labeled source domain to a related and unlabeled target domain with identical label space. The main workhorse in UDA is domain alignment and has proven successful. However, it is practically difficult to find an appropriate source domain with identical label space. A more practical scenario is partial domain adaptation (PDA) where the source label space subsumes the target one. Unfortunately, due to the non-identity between label spaces, it is extremely hard to obtain an ideal alignment, conversely, easier resulting in mode collapse and negative transfer. These motivate us to find a relatively simpler alternative to solve PDA. To achieve this, we first explore a theoretical analysis, which says that the target risk is bounded by both model smoothness and between-domain discrepancy. Then, we instantiate the model smoothness as an intra-domain structure preserving (IDSP) while giving up possibly riskier domain alignment. To our best knowledge, this is the first naive attempt for PDA without alignment. Finally, our empirical results on benchmarks demonstrate that IDSP is not only superior to the PDA SOTAs (e.g., ∼ +10% on Cl → Rw and ∼ +8% on Ar → Rw), but also complementary to domain alignment in the standard UDA.