Improving Category-Aware Active Domain Adaptation via Uncertainty-Guided Region Coverage

Abstract

Active domain adaptation researches focus on alleviating the annotation cost, which comprises source data and target data labelling, as well as enhancing the performance of unsupervised domain adaptation. However, optimizing the adaptation model based on the average accuracy can lead to the drop in performance of some difficult categories. To overcome this issue, a point-wise selection strategy built upon the influence function can be used to improve domain adaptation performance. In our work, we first address the sensitive and redundant aspects of point-wise selection, which can lead to overfitting of the acquisition function. We thus introduce a region-based approach that ensures the improvement of the adaptation model by maximizing a positive manifold coverage. An uncertainty score is further introduced to the selection mechanism to learn a better decision boundary for the target domain. In comprehensive experiments, our proposed method surpasses the first category-aware active domain adaptation baseline as well as existing active domain adaptation methods across multiple domain adaptation benchmarks. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/nhtm2702/WHO IS NEXT.