Adversarial domain separation and adaptation

Traditional domain adaptation methods attempted to learn the shared representation for distribution matching between source domain and target domain where the individual information in both domains was not characterized. Such a solution suffers from the mixing problem of individual information with the shared features which considerably constrains the performance for domain adaptation. To relax this constraint, it is crucial to extract both shared information and individual information. This study captures both information via a new domain separation network where the shared features are extracted and purified via separate modeling of individual information in both domains. In particular, a hybrid adversarial learning is incorporated in a separation network as well as an adaptation network where the associated discriminators are jointly trained for domain separation and adaptation according to the minmax optimization over separation loss and domain discrepancy, respectively. Experiments on different tasks show the merit of using the proposed adversarial domain separation and adaptation.