The problem of domain generalization is to take knowledge acquired from a number of related domains where training data is available, and to then successfully apply it to previously unseen domains. We propose a new feature learning algorithm, Multi-Task Autoencoder (MTAE), that provides good generalization performance for crossdomain object recognition.Our algorithm extends the standard denoising autoencoder framework by substituting artificially induced corruption with naturally occurring inter-domain variability in the appearance of objects. Instead of reconstructing images from noisy versions, MTAE learns to transform the original image into analogs in multiple related domains. It thereby learns features that are robust to variations across domains. The learnt features are then used as inputs to a classifier.We evaluated the performance of the algorithm on benchmark image recognition datasets, where the task is to learn features from multiple datasets and to then predict the image label from unseen datasets. We found that (denoising) MTAE outperforms alternative autoencoder-based models as well as the current state-of-the-art algorithms for domain generalization.

We explore an original strategy for building deep networks, based on stacking layers of denoising autoencoders which are trained locally to denoise corrupted versions of their inputs. The resulting algorithm is a straightforward variation on the stacking of ordinary autoencoders. It is however shown on a benchmark of classification problems to yield significantly lower classification error, thus bridging the performance gap with deep belief networks (DBN), and in several cases surpassing it. Higher level representations learnt in this purely unsupervised fashion also help boost the performance of subsequent SVM classifiers. Qualitative experiments show that, contrary to ordinary autoencoders, denoising autoencoders are able to learn Gabor-like edge detectors from natural image patches and larger stroke detectors from digit images. This work clearly establishes the value of using a denoising criterion as a tractable unsupervised objective to guide the learning of useful higher level representations.

We introduce a new representation learning approach for domain adaptation, in which data at training and test time come from similar but different distributions. Our approach is directly inspired by the theory on domain adaptation suggesting that, for effective domain transfer to be achieved, predictions must be made based on features that cannot discriminate between the training (source) and test (target) domains.The approach implements this idea in the context of neural network architectures that are trained on labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain (no labeled target-domain data is necessary). As the training progresses, the approach promotes the emergence of features that are (i) discriminative for the main learning task on the source domain and (ii) indiscriminate with respect to the shift between the domains. We show that this adaptation behaviour can be achieved in almost any feed-forward model by augmenting it with few standard layers and a new gradient reversal layer. The resulting augmented architecture can be trained using standard backpropagation and stochastic gradient descent, and can thus be implemented with little effort using any of the deep learning packages.We demonstrate the success of our approach for two distinct classification problems (document sentiment analysis and image classification), where state-of-the-art domain adaptation performance on standard benchmarks is achieved. We also validate the approach for descriptor learning task in the context of person re-identification application.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of domain generalization: how to learn a generalized feature representation for an "unseen" target domain by taking the advantage of multiple seen source-domain data. We present a novel framework based on adversarial autoencoders to learn a generalized latent feature representation across domains for domain generalization. To be specific, we extend adversarial autoencoders by imposing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) measure to align the distributions among different domains, and matching the aligned distribution to an arbitrary prior distribution via adversarial feature learning. In this way, the learned feature representation is supposed to be universal to the seen source domains because of the MMD regularization, and is expected to generalize well on the target domain because of the introduction of the prior distribution. We proposed an algorithm to jointly train different components of our proposed framework. Extensive experiments on various vision tasks demonstrate that our proposed framework can learn better generalized features for the unseen target domain compared with state-of-the-art domain generalization methods.

The cost of large scale data collection and annotation often makes the application of machine learning algorithms to new tasks or datasets prohibitively expensive. One approach circumventing this cost is training models on synthetic data where annotations are provided automatically. Despite their appeal, such models often fail to generalize from synthetic to real images, necessitating domain adaptation algorithms to manipulate these models before they can be successfully applied. Existing approaches focus either on mapping representations from one domain to the other, or on learning to extract features that are invariant to the domain from which they were extracted. However, by focusing only on creating a mapping or shared representation between the two domains, they ignore the individual characteristics of each domain. We suggest that explicitly modeling what is unique to each domain can improve a model's ability to extract domain-invariant features. Inspired by work on private-shared component analysis, we explicitly learn to extract image representations that are partitioned into two subspaces: one component which is private to each domain and one which is shared across domains. Our model is trained not only to perform the task we care about in the source domain, but also to use the partitioned representation to reconstruct the images from both domains. Our novel architecture results in a model that outperforms the state-of-the-art on a range of unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios and additionally produces visualizations of the private and shared representations enabling interpretation of the domain adaptation process.

Domain generalization aims to learn a classification model from multiple source domains and generalize it to unseen target domains. A critical problem in domain generalization involves learning domaininvariant representations. Let X and Y denote the features and the labels, respectively. Under the assumption that the conditional distribution P (Y |X) remains unchanged across domains, earlier approaches to domain generalization learned the invariant representation T (X) by minimizing the discrepancy of the marginal distribution P (T (X)). However, such an assumption of stable P (Y |X) does not necessarily hold in practice. In addition, the representation learning function T (X) is usually constrained to a simple linear transformation or shallow networks. To address the above two drawbacks, we propose an end-to-end conditional invariant deep domain generalization approach by leveraging deep neural networks for domain-invariant representation learning. The domain-invariance property is guaranteed through a conditional invariant adversarial network that can learn domain-invariant representations w.r.t. the joint distribution P (T (X), Y ) if the target domain data are not severely class unbalanced. We perform various experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning, and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning.

Domain adaptation is an important emerging topic in computer vision. In this paper, we present one of the first studies of domain shift in the context of object recognition. We introduce a method that adapts object models acquired in a particular visual domain to new imaging conditions by learning a transformation that minimizes the effect of domain-induced changes in the feature distribution. The transformation is learned in a supervised manner and can be applied to categories for which there are no labeled examples in the new domain. While we focus our evaluation on object recognition tasks, the transform-based adaptation technique we develop is general and could be applied to non-image data. Another contribution is a new multi-domain object database, freely available for download. We experimentally demonstrate the ability of our method to improve recognition on categories with few or no target domain labels and moderate to large changes in the imaging conditions.

This work provides a unified framework for addressing the problem of visual supervised domain adaptation and generalization with deep models. The main idea is to exploit the Siamese architecture to learn an embedding subspace that is discriminative, and where mapped visual domains are semantically aligned and yet maximally separated. The supervised setting becomes attractive especially when only few target data samples need to be labeled. In this scenario, alignment and separation of semantic probability distributions is difficult because of the lack of data. We found that by reverting to point-wise surrogates of distribution distances and similarities provides an effective solution. In addition, the approach has a high "speed" of adaptation, which requires an extremely low number of labeled target training samples, even one per category can be effective. The approach is extended to domain generalization. For both applications the experiments show very promising results.

We evaluate whether features extracted from the activation of a deep convolutional network trained in a fully supervised fashion on a large, fixed set of object recognition tasks can be repurposed to novel generic tasks. Our generic tasks may differ significantly from the originally trained tasks and there may be insufficient labeled or unlabeled data to conventionally train or adapt a deep architecture to the new tasks. We investigate and visualize the semantic clustering of deep convolutional features with respect to a variety of such tasks, including scene recognition, domain adaptation, and fine-grained recognition challenges. We compare the efficacy of relying on various network levels to define a fixed feature, and report novel results that significantly outperform the state-of-the-art on several important vision challenges. We are releasing DeCAF, an open-source implementation of these deep convolutional activation features, along with all associated network parameters to enable vision researchers to be able to conduct experimentation with deep representations across a range of visual concept learning paradigms.

The problem of domain generalization is to learn from multiple training domains, and extract a domain-agnostic model that can then be applied to an unseen domain. Domain generalization (DG) has a clear motivation in contexts where there are target domains with distinct characteristics, yet sparse data for training. For example recognition in sketch images, which are distinctly more abstract and rarer than photos. Nevertheless, DG methods have primarily been evaluated on photo-only benchmarks focusing on alleviating the dataset bias where both problems of domain distinctiveness and data sparsity can be minimal. We argue that these benchmarks are overly straightforward, and show that simple deep learning baselines perform surprisingly well on them.In this paper, we make two main contributions: Firstly, we build upon the favorable domain shift-robust properties of deep learning methods, and develop a low-rank parameterized CNN model for end-to-end DG learning. Secondly, we develop a DG benchmark dataset covering photo, sketch, cartoon and painting domains. This is both more practically relevant, and harder (bigger domain shift) than existing benchmarks. The results show that our method outperforms existing DG alternatives, and our dataset provides a more significant DG challenge to drive future research.

Deep domain adaptation has emerged as a new learning technique to address the lack of massive amounts of labeled data. Compared to conventional methods, which learn shared feature subspaces or reuse important source instances with shallow representations, deep domain adaptation methods leverage deep networks to learn more transferable representations by embedding domain adaptation in the pipeline of deep learning. There have been comprehensive surveys for shallow domain adaptation, but few timely reviews the emerging deep learning based methods. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of deep domain adaptation methods for computer vision applications with four major contributions. First, we present a taxonomy of different deep domain adaptation scenarios according to the properties of data that define how two domains are diverged. Second, we summarize deep domain adaptation approaches into several categories based on training loss, and analyze and compare briefly the state-of-the-art methods under these categories. Third, we overview the computer vision applications that go beyond image classification, such as face recognition, semantic segmentation and object detection. Fourth, some potential deficiencies of current methods and several future directions are highlighted.

对分布（OOD）数据的概括是人类自然的能力，但对于机器而言挑战。这是因为大多数学习算法强烈依赖于i.i.d.〜对源/目标数据的假设，这在域转移导致的实践中通常会违反。域的概括（DG）旨在通过仅使用源数据进行模型学习来实现OOD的概括。在过去的十年中，DG的研究取得了长足的进步，导致了广泛的方法论，例如，基于域的一致性，元学习，数据增强或合奏学习的方法，仅举几例；还在各个应用领域进行了研究，包括计算机视觉，语音识别，自然语言处理，医学成像和强化学习。在本文中，首次提供了DG中的全面文献综述，以总结过去十年来的发展。具体而言，我们首先通过正式定义DG并将其与其他相关领域（如域适应和转移学习）联系起来来涵盖背景。然后，我们对现有方法和理论进行了彻底的审查。最后，我们通过有关未来研究方向的见解和讨论来总结这项调查。

虽然在许多域内生成并提供了大量的未标记数据，但对视觉数据的自动理解的需求高于以往任何时候。大多数现有机器学习模型通常依赖于大量标记的训练数据来实现高性能。不幸的是，在现实世界的应用中，不能满足这种要求。标签的数量有限，手动注释数据昂贵且耗时。通常需要将知识从现有标记域传输到新域。但是，模型性能因域之间的差异（域移位或数据集偏差）而劣化。为了克服注释的负担，域适应（DA）旨在在将知识从一个域转移到另一个类似但不同的域中时减轻域移位问题。无监督的DA（UDA）处理标记的源域和未标记的目标域。 UDA的主要目标是减少标记的源数据和未标记的目标数据之间的域差异，并在培训期间在两个域中学习域不变的表示。在本文中，我们首先定义UDA问题。其次，我们从传统方法和基于深度学习的方法中概述了不同类别的UDA的最先进的方法。最后，我们收集常用的基准数据集和UDA最先进方法的报告结果对视觉识别问题。

Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. Due to the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies of transfer learning in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Unlike previous surveys, this survey paper reviews more than forty representative transfer learning approaches, especially homogeneous transfer learning approaches, from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, over twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.

Domain Adaptation is an actively researched problem in Computer Vision. In this work, we propose an approach that leverages unsupervised data to bring the source and target distributions closer in a learned joint feature space. We accomplish this by inducing a symbiotic relationship between the learned embedding and a generative adversarial network. This is in contrast to methods which use the adversarial framework for realistic data generation and retraining deep models with such data. We demonstrate the strength and generality of our approach by performing experiments on three different tasks with varying levels of difficulty: (1) Digit classification (MNIST, SVHN and USPS datasets) (2) Object recognition using OFFICE dataset and (3) Domain adaptation from synthetic to real data. Our method achieves state-of-the art performance in most experimental settings and by far the only GAN-based method that has been shown to work well across different datasets such as OFFICE and DIGITS.

无监督域适应（UDA）旨在将知识从相关但不同的良好标记的源域转移到新的未标记的目标域。大多数现有的UDA方法需要访问源数据，因此当数据保密而不相配在隐私问题时，不适用。本文旨在仅使用培训的分类模型来解决现实设置，而不是访问源数据。为了有效地利用适应源模型，我们提出了一种新颖的方法，称为源假设转移（拍摄），其通过将目标数据特征拟合到冻结源分类模块（表示分类假设）来学习目标域的特征提取模块。具体而言，拍摄挖掘出于特征提取模块的信息最大化和自我监督学习，以确保目标特征通过同一假设与看不见的源数据的特征隐式对齐。此外，我们提出了一种新的标签转移策略，它基于预测的置信度（标签信息），然后采用半监督学习来将目标数据分成两个分裂，然后提高目标域中的较为自信预测的准确性。如果通过拍摄获得预测，我们表示标记转移为拍摄++。关于两位数分类和对象识别任务的广泛实验表明，拍摄和射击++实现了与最先进的结果超越或相当的结果，展示了我们对各种视域适应问题的方法的有效性。代码可用于\ url {https：//github.com/tim-learn/shot-plus}。

Deep learning has produced state-of-the-art results for a variety of tasks. While such approaches for supervised learning have performed well, they assume that training and testing data are drawn from the same distribution, which may not always be the case. As a complement to this challenge, single-source unsupervised domain adaptation can handle situations where a network is trained on labeled data from a source domain and unlabeled data from a related but different target domain with the goal of performing well at test-time on the target domain. Many single-source and typically homogeneous unsupervised deep domain adaptation approaches have thus been developed, combining the powerful, hierarchical representations from deep learning with domain adaptation to reduce reliance on potentially-costly target data labels. This survey will compare these approaches by examining alternative methods, the unique and common elements, results, and theoretical insights. We follow this with a look at application areas and open research directions.

Deep convolutional networks have proven to be very successful in learning task specific features that allow for unprecedented performance on various computer vision tasks. Training of such networks follows mostly the supervised learning paradigm, where sufficiently many input-output pairs are required for training. Acquisition of large training sets is one of the key challenges, when approaching a new task. In this paper, we aim for generic feature learning and present an approach for training a convolutional network using only unlabeled data. To this end, we train the network to discriminate between a set of surrogate classes. Each surrogate class is formed by applying a variety of transformations to a randomly sampled 'seed' image patch. In contrast to supervised network training, the resulting feature representation is not class specific. It rather provides robustness to the transformations that have been applied during training. This generic feature representation allows for classification results that outperform the state of the art for unsupervised learning on several popular datasets . While such generic features cannot compete with class specific features from supervised training on a classification task, we show that they are advantageous on geometric matching problems, where they also outperform the SIFT descriptor.

Top-performing deep architectures are trained on massive amounts of labeled data. In the absence of labeled data for a certain task, domain adaptation often provides an attractive option given that labeled data of similar nature but from a different domain (e.g. synthetic images) are available. Here, we propose a new approach to domain adaptation in deep architectures that can be trained on large amount of labeled data from the source domain and large amount of unlabeled data from the target domain (no labeled targetdomain data is necessary).As the training progresses, the approach promotes the emergence of "deep" features that are (i) discriminative for the main learning task on the source domain and (ii) invariant with respect to the shift between the domains. We show that this adaptation behaviour can be achieved in almost any feed-forward model by augmenting it with few standard layers and a simple new gradient reversal layer. The resulting augmented architecture can be trained using standard backpropagation.Overall, the approach can be implemented with little effort using any of the deep-learning packages. The method performs very well in a series of image classification experiments, achieving adaptation effect in the presence of big domain shifts and outperforming previous state-ofthe-art on Office datasets.