Prototype-Based Multisource Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to transfer knowledge from labeled source domain to unlabeled target domain. Recently, multisource domain adaptation (MDA) has begun to attract attention. Its performance should go beyond simply mixing all source domains together for knowledge transfer. In this article, we propose a novel prototype-based method for MDA. Specifically, for solving the problem that the target domain has no label, we use the prototype to transfer the semantic category information from source domains to target domain. First, a feature extraction network is applied to both source and target domains to obtain the extracted features from which the domain-invariant features and domain-specific features will be disentangled. Then, based on these two kinds of features, the named inherent class prototypes and domain prototypes are estimated, respectively. Then a prototype mapping to the extracted feature space is learned in the feature reconstruction process. Thus, the class prototypes for all source and target domains can be constructed in the extracted feature space based on the previous domain prototypes and inherent class prototypes. By forcing the extracted features are close to the corresponding class prototypes for all domains, the feature extraction network is progressively adjusted. In the end, the inherent class prototypes are used as a classifier in the target domain. Our contribution is that through the inherent class prototypes and domain prototypes, the semantic category information from source domains is transformed into the target domain by constructing the corresponding class prototypes. In our method, all source and target domains are aligned twice at the feature level for better domain-invariant features and more closer features to the class prototypes, respectively. Several experiments on public data sets also prove the effectiveness of our method.