Transfer Adaptation Learning: A Decade Survey

The world we see is ever-changing and it always changes with people, things, and the environment. Domain is referred to as the state of the world at a certain moment. A research problem is characterized as transfer adaptation learning (TAL) when it needs knowledge correspondence between different moments/domains. TAL aims to build models that can perform tasks of target domain by learning knowledge from a semantic-related but distribution different source domain. It is an energetic research field of increasing influence and importance, which is presenting a blowout publication trend. This article surveys the advances of TAL methodologies in the past decade, and the technical challenges and essential problems of TAL have been observed and discussed with deep insights and new perspectives. Broader solutions of TAL being created by researchers are identified, i.e., instance reweighting adaptation, feature adaptation, classifier adaptation, deep network adaptation, and adversarial adaptation, which are beyond the early semisupervised and unsupervised split. The survey helps researchers rapidly but comprehensively understand and identify the research foundation, research status, theoretical limitations, future challenges, and understudied issues (universality, interpretability, and credibility) to be broken in the field toward generalizable representation in open-world scenarios.