Mutual Variational Inference: An Indirect Variational Inference Approach for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In this article, the unsupervised domain adaptation problem, where an approximate inference model is to be learned from a labeled dataset and expected to generalize well on an unlabeled dataset, is considered. Unlike the existing work, we explicitly unveil the importance of the latent variables produced by the feature extractor, that is, encoder, where contains the most representative information about their input samples, for the knowledge transfer. We argue that an estimator of the representation of the two datasets can be used as an agent for knowledge transfer. To be specific, a novel variational inference approach is proposed to approximate a latent distribution from the unlabeled dataset that can be used to accurately predict its input samples. It is demonstrated that the discriminative knowledge of the latent distribution that is learned from the labeled dataset can be progressively transferred to that is learned from the unlabeled dataset by simultaneously optimizing the estimator via the variational inference and our proposed regularization for shifting the mean of the estimator. The experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods for both object classification and digit classification.