Domain adaptation techniques aim at adapting a classifier learnt on a source domain to work on the target domain. Exploiting the subspaces spanned by features of the source and target domains respectively is one approach that has been investigated towards solving this problem. These techniques normally assume the existence of a single subspace for the entire source target domain. In this work, we consider the hierarchical organization of the data and consider multiple subspaces for the source and target domain based on the hierarchy. We evaluate different subspace based domain adaptation techniques under this setting and observe that using different subspaces based on the hierarchy yields consistent improvement over a non-hierarchical baseline
@cite_11: Adapting the classifier trained on a source domain to recognize instances from a new target domain is an important problem that is receiving recent attention. In this paper, we present one of the first studies on unsupervised domain adaptation in the context of object recognition, where we have labeled data only from the source domain (and therefore do not have correspondences between object categories across domains). Motivated by incremental learning, we create intermediate representations of data between the two domains by viewing the generative subspaces (of same dimension) created from these domains as points on the Grassmann manifold, and sampling points along the geodesic between them to obtain subspaces that provide a meaningful description of the underlying domain shift. We then obtain the projections of labeled source domain data onto these subspaces, from which a discriminative classifier is learnt to classify projected data from the target domain. We discuss extensions of our approach for semi-supervised adaptation, and for cases with multiple source and target domains, and report competitive results on standard datasets.
@cite_9: In this paper, we introduce a new domain adaptation (DA) algorithm where the source and target domains are represented by subspaces described by eigenvectors. In this context, our method seeks a domain adaptation solution by learning a mapping function which aligns the source subspace with the target one. We show that the solution of the corresponding optimization problem can be obtained in a simple closed form, leading to an extremely fast algorithm. We use a theoretical result to tune the unique hyper parameter corresponding to the size of the subspaces. We run our method on various datasets and show that, despite its intrinsic simplicity, it outperforms state of the art DA methods.
@cite_1: Abstract A method of speaker adaptation for continuous density hidden Markov models (HMMs) is presented. An initial speaker-independent system is adapted to improve the modelling of a new speaker by updating the HMM parameters. Statistics are gathered from the available adaptation data and used to calculate a linear regression-based transformation for the mean vectors. The transformation matrices are calculated to maximize the likelihood of the adaptation data and can be implemented using the forward–backward algorithm. By tying the transformations among a number of distributions, adaptation can be performed for distributions which are not represented in the training data. An important feature of the method is that arbitrary adaptation data can be used—no special enrolment sentences are needed. Experiments have been performed on the ARPA RM1 database using an HMM system with cross-word triphones and mixture Gaussian output distributions. Results show that adaptation can be performed using as little as 11 s of adaptation data, and that as more data is used the adaptation performance improves. For example, using 40 adaptation utterances, a 37 reduction in error from the speaker-independent system was achieved with supervised adaptation and a 32 reduction in unsupervised mode.
@cite_0: In supervised learning, it is typically assumed that the labeled training data comes from the same distribution as the test data to which the system will be applied. In recent years, machine-learning researchers have investigated methods to handle mismatch between the training and test domains, with the goal of building a classifier using the labeled data in the old domain that will perform well on the test data in the new domain. This problem is called domain adaptation or transfer learning, and it is a common scenario in speech processing applications. Labeled training data are often produced by an expensive hand-annotation process, and may consist of only one or two annotated corpora which are used to train virtually all systems regardless of the target domain. Often little or no labeled data is available for the new domain. In this work, we review the statistical machine learning literature dealing with the problem of “domain adaptation” or “transfer learning”. We focus on unsupervised domain adaptation methods, as opposed to model adaptation or supervised adaptation in which some labeled data is available from the test distribution. We consider four main classes of approaches in the literature: instance weighting for covariate shift; selflabeling methods; changes in feature representation; and cluster-based learning. Covariate shift methods re-weight training samples in the old domain to try to match the new domain, putting more weight on samples in populous regions in the new domain. Self-labeling methods incorporate unlabeled target domain examples into the training algorithm by making an initial guess about their labels and then iteratively refining the guesses or labeling more examples. Feature representation approaches try to find a new feature representation of the data, either to make the new and old distributions look similar, or to find an abstracted representation for domain-specific features. Cluster-based methods rely on the assumption that samples connected by high-density paths are likely to have the same label. Domain adaptation is a large area of research, with related work under several frameworks (and several names). A limited review from March 2008 can be found in [1], and one from Oct 2010 can be found in [2]. A recent book [3] investigates train test distribution mismatch in machine learning (particularly focused on covariate shift.) Some of the organization here roughly follows that in [1].
@cite_19: Discriminative learning methods for classification perform well when training and test data are drawn from the same distribution. In many situations, though, we have labeled training data for a source domain, and we wish to learn a classifier which performs well on a target domain with a different distribution. Under what conditions can we adapt a classifier trained on the source domain for use in the target domain? Intuitively, a good feature representation is a crucial factor in the success of domain adaptation. We formalize this intuition theoretically with a generalization bound for domain adaption. Our theory illustrates the tradeoffs inherent in designing a representation for domain adaptation and gives a new justification for a recently proposed model. It also points toward a promising new model for domain adaptation: one which explicitly minimizes the difference between the source and target domains, while at the same time maximizing the margin of the training set.
@cite_2: In this paper we analyse one of the most challenging problems in natural language processing: domain adaptation in sentiment classification. In particular, we look for generic features by making use of linguistic patterns as an alternative to the commonly feature vectors based on ngrams. The experimentation conducted shows how sentiment classification is highly sensitive to the domain from which the training data are extracted. However, the results of the experimentation also show how a model constructed around linguistic patterns is a plausible alternative for sentiment classification over some domains.
@cite_5: In real-world applications of visual recognition, many factors — such as pose, illumination, or image quality — can cause a significant mismatch between the source domain on which classifiers are trained and the target domain to which those classifiers are applied. As such, the classifiers often perform poorly on the target domain. Domain adaptation techniques aim to correct the mismatch. Existing approaches have concentrated on learning feature representations that are invariant across domains, and they often do not directly exploit low-dimensional structures that are intrinsic to many vision datasets. In this paper, we propose a new kernel-based method that takes advantage of such structures. Our geodesic flow kernel models domain shift by integrating an infinite number of subspaces that characterize changes in geometric and statistical properties from the source to the target domain. Our approach is computationally advantageous, automatically inferring important algorithmic parameters without requiring extensive cross-validation or labeled data from either domain. We also introduce a metric that reliably measures the adaptability between a pair of source and target domains. For a given target domain and several source domains, the metric can be used to automatically select the optimal source domain to adapt and avoid less desirable ones. Empirical studies on standard datasets demonstrate the advantages of our approach over competing methods.
@cite_12: 
@cite_17: Datasets are an integral part of contemporary object recognition research. They have been the chief reason for the considerable progress in the field, not just as source of large amounts of training data, but also as means of measuring and comparing performance of competing algorithms. At the same time, datasets have often been blamed for narrowing the focus of object recognition research, reducing it to a single benchmark performance number. Indeed, some datasets, that started out as data capture efforts aimed at representing the visual world, have become closed worlds unto themselves (e.g. the Corel world, the Caltech-101 world, the PASCAL VOC world). With the focus on beating the latest benchmark numbers on the latest dataset, have we perhaps lost sight of the original purpose? The goal of this paper is to take stock of the current state of recognition datasets. We present a comparison study using a set of popular datasets, evaluated based on a number of criteria including: relative data bias, cross-dataset generalization, effects of closed-world assumption, and sample value. The experimental results, some rather surprising, suggest directions that can improve dataset collection as well as algorithm evaluation protocols. But more broadly, the hope is to stimulate discussion in the community regarding this very important, but largely neglected issue.
As mentioned in section domain adaptation is widely studied in many fields including Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing and Computer Vision @cite_17 @cite_2 @cite_1 . A survey on recent advances in domain adaptation in natural language processing and computer vision can be found in @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_12 . Subspace based approaches are most popular for solving the visual domain shift problem @cite_9 @cite_5 @cite_11 . The same principal lies behind these approaches. They first determine separate subspaces for source and target data and then project the data onto these subspaces and or a set of intermediate sampled subspaces with the aim of making the feature point domain invariant. In @cite_11 , a method is proposed to sample subspaces along the geodesic between source and target subspace on the Grassmann manifold. Once sampling is done then features are projected onto those sampled subspaces and a classifier is trained on the projected features. In @cite_5 , the geodesic flow kernel is proposed to capture the incremental details in subspaces between source and target subspace along the geodesic. Instead of using intermediate subspaces, @cite_9 proposes to learn a transformation to directly align the source subspace to the target subspace.