Title: Incremental Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Continually Changing Environments,
Abstract: Continuous appearance shifts such as changes in weather and lighting
conditions can impact the performance of deployed machine learning models.
While unsupervised domain adaptation aims to address this challenge, current
approaches do not utilise the continuity of the occurring shifts. In
particular, many robotics applications exhibit these conditions and thus
facilitate the potential to incrementally adapt a learnt model over minor
shifts which integrate to massive differences over time. Our work presents an
adversarial approach for lifelong, incremental domain adaptation which benefits
from unsupervised alignment to a series of intermediate domains which
successively diverge from the labelled source domain. We empirically
demonstrate that our incremental approach improves handling of large appearance
changes, e.g. day to night, on a traversable-path segmentation task compared
with a direct, single alignment step approach. Furthermore, by approximating
the feature distribution for the source domain with a generative adversarial
network, the deployment module can be rendered fully independent of retaining
potentially large amounts of the related source training data for only a minor
reduction in performance.