ICML2026

Regularized Discriminative Alignment for Deep Representations under Label Shift

Hengchao Shi, Boen Jiang, Guanhua Fang, Wen Yu, Ming Zheng

摘要

Label shift refers to the distribution shift scenario where the marginal label distribution changes while the class-conditional distribution remains invariant. To address this challenge in complex real-world settings, we propose Regularized Discriminative Alignment for Label Shift (RDALS) , a novel framework that adapts to target domains by aligning distributions within the deep latent space. By shifting the focus from raw inputs to learned representations, RDALS effectively operates under a weaker and more practical invariance assumption. Specifically, we construct a moment-matching linear system using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and show that this choice maximizes numerical stability. We further provide rigorous theoretical analysis, establishing finite-sample error bounds for the importance weight estimation and the generalization bounds for the adapted classifier. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that RDALS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior robustness and accuracy in both data-scarce and extreme-shift regimes.