CSTrans: cross-subdomain transformer for unsupervised domain adaptation

Abstract Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to make full use of a labeled source domain data to classify an unlabeled target domain data. With the success of Transformer in various vision tasks, existing UDA methods borrow strong Transformer framework to learn global domain-invariant feature...

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Main Authors: Junchi Liu, Xiang Zhang, Zhigang Luo
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer 2025-01-01
Series:Complex & Intelligent Systems
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Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1007/s40747-024-01709-4
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author Junchi Liu
Xiang Zhang
Zhigang Luo
author_facet Junchi Liu
Xiang Zhang
Zhigang Luo
author_sort Junchi Liu
collection DOAJ
description Abstract Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to make full use of a labeled source domain data to classify an unlabeled target domain data. With the success of Transformer in various vision tasks, existing UDA methods borrow strong Transformer framework to learn global domain-invariant feature representation from the domain level or category level. Of them, the cross-attention as a key component acts for the cross-domain feature alignment, benefiting from its robustness. Intriguingly, we find that the robustness makes the model insensitive to the sub-grouping property within the same category of both source and target domains, known as the subdomain structure. This is because the robustness regards some fine-grained information as the noises and removes them. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose an end-to-end Cross-Subdomain Transformer framework (CSTrans) to exploit the transferability of subdomain structures and the robustness of cross-attention to calibrate inter-domain features. Specifically, there are two innovations in this paper. First, we devise an efficient Index Matching Module (IMM) to calculate the cross-attention of the same category in different domains and learn the domain-invariant representation. This not only simplifies the traditional daunting image-pair selection but also paves the safer way for guarding fine-grained subdomain information. This is because the IMM implements reliable feature confusion. Second, we introduce discriminative clustering to mine the subdomain structures in the same category and further learn subdomain discrimination. Both aspects cooperates with each other for fewer training stages. We perform extensive studies on five benchmarks, and the respective experimental results show that, as compared to existing UDA siblings, CSTrans attains remarkable results with average classification accuracy of 94.3%, 92.1%, and 85.4% on datasets Office-31, ImageCLEF-DA, and Office-Home, respectively.
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spelling doaj-art-e829ea9c19244ba69ab4a6a473900a482025-02-02T12:48:50ZengSpringerComplex & Intelligent Systems2199-45362198-60532025-01-0111111410.1007/s40747-024-01709-4CSTrans: cross-subdomain transformer for unsupervised domain adaptationJunchi Liu0Xiang Zhang1Zhigang Luo2College of Computing, National University of Defense TechnologyCollege of Computing, National University of Defense TechnologyCollege of Computing, National University of Defense TechnologyAbstract Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to make full use of a labeled source domain data to classify an unlabeled target domain data. With the success of Transformer in various vision tasks, existing UDA methods borrow strong Transformer framework to learn global domain-invariant feature representation from the domain level or category level. Of them, the cross-attention as a key component acts for the cross-domain feature alignment, benefiting from its robustness. Intriguingly, we find that the robustness makes the model insensitive to the sub-grouping property within the same category of both source and target domains, known as the subdomain structure. This is because the robustness regards some fine-grained information as the noises and removes them. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose an end-to-end Cross-Subdomain Transformer framework (CSTrans) to exploit the transferability of subdomain structures and the robustness of cross-attention to calibrate inter-domain features. Specifically, there are two innovations in this paper. First, we devise an efficient Index Matching Module (IMM) to calculate the cross-attention of the same category in different domains and learn the domain-invariant representation. This not only simplifies the traditional daunting image-pair selection but also paves the safer way for guarding fine-grained subdomain information. This is because the IMM implements reliable feature confusion. Second, we introduce discriminative clustering to mine the subdomain structures in the same category and further learn subdomain discrimination. Both aspects cooperates with each other for fewer training stages. We perform extensive studies on five benchmarks, and the respective experimental results show that, as compared to existing UDA siblings, CSTrans attains remarkable results with average classification accuracy of 94.3%, 92.1%, and 85.4% on datasets Office-31, ImageCLEF-DA, and Office-Home, respectively.https://doi.org/10.1007/s40747-024-01709-4Vision transformerSubdomain adaptationIndex matching moduleUnsupervised discriminative clustering
spellingShingle Junchi Liu
Xiang Zhang
Zhigang Luo
CSTrans: cross-subdomain transformer for unsupervised domain adaptation
Complex & Intelligent Systems
Vision transformer
Subdomain adaptation
Index matching module
Unsupervised discriminative clustering
title CSTrans: cross-subdomain transformer for unsupervised domain adaptation
title_full CSTrans: cross-subdomain transformer for unsupervised domain adaptation
title_fullStr CSTrans: cross-subdomain transformer for unsupervised domain adaptation
title_full_unstemmed CSTrans: cross-subdomain transformer for unsupervised domain adaptation
title_short CSTrans: cross-subdomain transformer for unsupervised domain adaptation
title_sort cstrans cross subdomain transformer for unsupervised domain adaptation
topic Vision transformer
Subdomain adaptation
Index matching module
Unsupervised discriminative clustering
url https://doi.org/10.1007/s40747-024-01709-4
work_keys_str_mv AT junchiliu cstranscrosssubdomaintransformerforunsuperviseddomainadaptation
AT xiangzhang cstranscrosssubdomaintransformerforunsuperviseddomainadaptation
AT zhigangluo cstranscrosssubdomaintransformerforunsuperviseddomainadaptation