Multi-Source Domain Adaptation with Distribution Fusion and Relationship Extraction

Transfer learning is gaining increasing attention due to its ability to leverage previously acquired knowledge to assist in completing a prediction task in a similar domain. While many existing transfer learning methods deal with single source and single target problem without considering the fact that a target domain maybe similar to multiple source domains, this work proposes a multi-source domain adaptation method based on a deep neural network. Our method contains common feature extraction, specific predictor learning and target predictor estimation. Common feature extraction explores the relationship between source domains and target domain by distribution fusion and guarantees the strength of similar source domains during training, something which has not been well considered in existing works. Specific predictor learning trains source tasks with cross-domain distribution constraint and cross-domain predictor constraint to enhance the performance of single source. Target predictor estimation employs relationship extraction and selective strategy to improve the performance of the target task and to avoid negative transfer. Experiments on real-world visual datasets show the performance of the proposed method is superior to other deep learning baselines.