Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation With Structure and Classification Space Alignment

Domain adaptation (DA) aims at facilitating the target model training by leveraging knowledge from related but distribution-inconsistent source domain. Most of the previous DA works concentrate on homogeneous scenarios, where the source and target domains are assumed to share the same feature space. Nevertheless, frequently, in reality, the domains are not consistent in not only data distribution but also the representation space and feature dimensions. That is, these domains are heterogeneous. Although many works have attempted to handle such heterogeneous DA (HDA) by transforming HDA to homogeneous counterparts or performing DA jointly with domain transformation, nearly all of them just concentrate on the feature and distribution alignment across domains, neglecting the structure and classification space preservation for domains themselves. In this work, we propose a novel HDA model, namely, heterogeneous classification space alignment (HCSA), which leverages knowledge from both the source samples and model parameters to the target. In HCSA, structure preservation, distribution, and classification space alignment are implemented, jointly with feature representation by transferring both the source-domain representation and model knowledge. Moreover, we design an alternating algorithm to optimize the HCSA model with guaranteed convergence and complexity analysis. In addition, the HCSA model is further extended with deep network architecture. Finally, we experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method by showing its superiority to the compared approaches.