Stochastic Classifiers for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

A common strategy adopted by existing state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods is to employ two classifiers to identify the misaligned local regions between a source and target domain. Following the 'wisdom of the crowd' principle, one has to ask: why stop at two? Indeed, we find that using more classifiers leads to better performance, but also introduces more model parameters, therefore risking overfitting. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called STochastic clAssifieRs (STAR) for addressing this problem. Instead of representing one classifier as a weight vector, STAR models it as a Gaussian distribution with its variance representing the interclassifier discrepancy. With STAR, we can now sample an arbitrary number of classifiers from the distribution, whilst keeping the model size the same as having two classifiers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that a variety of existing UDA methods can greatly benefit from STAR and achieve the state-of-the-art performance on both image classification and semantic segmentation tasks.