Optimal Transport with Dimensionality Reduction for Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation manages to learn a robust classifier for target domain, using the source domain, but they often follow different distributions. To bridge distribution shift between the two domains, most of previous works aim to align their feature distributions through feature transformation, of which optimal transport for domain adaptation has attract researchers' interest, as it can exploit the local information of the two domains in the process of mapping the source instances to the target ones by minimizing Wasserstein distance between their feature distributions. However, it may weaken the feature discriminability of source domain, thus degrade domain adaptation performance. To address this problem, this paper proposes a two-stage feature-based adaptation approach, referred to as optimal transport with dimensionality reduction (OTDR). In the first stage, we apply the dimensionality reduction with intradomain variant maximization but source intraclass compactness minimization, to separate data samples as much as possible and enhance the feature discriminability of the source domain. In the second stage, we leverage optimal transport-based technique to preserve the local information of the two domains. Notably, the desirable properties in the first stage can mitigate the degradation of feature discriminability of the source domain in the second stage. Extensive experiments on several cross-domain image datasets validate that OTDR is superior to its competitors in classification accuracy.