Mind the Gap: Open Set Domain Adaptation via Mutual-to-Separate Framework

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to leverage labeled data from a source domain to learn a classifier for an unlabeled target domain. Amongst its many variants, open set domain adaptation (OSDA) is perhaps the most challenging one, as it further assumes the presence of unknown classes in the target domain. In this paper, we study OSDA with a particular focus on enriching its ability to traverse across larger domain gaps, and we show that existing state-of-the-art methods suffer a considerable performance drop in the presence of larger domain gaps, especially on a new dataset (PACS) that we re-purposed for OSDA. Exploring this is pivotal for OSDA as with increasing domain shift, identifying unknown samples in the target domain becomes harder for the model, thus making negative transfer between source and target domains more challenging. Accordingly, we propose a Mutual-to-Separate (MTS) framework to address the larger domain gaps. Essentially we design two networks – (a) Sample Separation Network (SSN): which is trained to learn a hyperplane for separating unknown samples from known ones, and (b) Distribution Matching Network (DMN): which is trained to maximise domain confusion between source and target domains without unknown samples under the guidance of the SSN. The key insight lies in how we exploit the mutually beneficial information between these two networks. On closer observation, we see that SSN can reveal which samples in the target domain belong to the unknown class by instance weighting whereas, DMN pushes apart the samples that most likely belong to the unknown class in the target domain, which in turn reduces the difficulty of SSN in identifying unknown samples. It follows that (a) and (b) will mutually supervise each other and alternate until convergence, which can better align the source and target domains in the shared label space. Extensive experiments on five datasets (Office-31, Office-Home, PACS, VisDA, and
mini
_DomainNet) demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. Detailed ablation experiments also validate the effectiveness of each component and the generality of the proposed framework. Codes are available at: https://github.com/PRIS-CV/Mutual-to-Separate.