Gradual Domain Adaptation via Normalizing Flows

Abstract

Conventional domain adaptation methods do not work well when a large gap exists between the source and the target domain. Gradual domain adaptation is one of the approaches to address the problem by leveraging the intermediate domain, which gradually shifts from the source to the target domain. The previous work assumed that the number of the intermediate domains is large and the distance of the adjacent domains is small; hence, the gradual domain adaptation algorithm by self-training with unlabeled datasets was applicable. In practice, however, gradual self-training will fail because the number of the intermediate domains is limited, and the distance of the adjacent domains is large. We propose using normalizing flows to mitigate this problem while maintaining the framework of unsupervised domain adaptation. We generate pseudo intermediate domains from normalizing flows and then use them for gradual domain adaptation. We evaluate our method by experiments with real-world datasets and confirm that our proposed method mitigates the above explained problem and improves the classification performance.