Quantifying Samples with Invariance for Source-Free Class Incremental Domain Adaptation

In response to the growing demands of real-world applications, models must be capable of learning continuously under inconsistent data distribution. However, existing Class-Incremental (CI) methods fail to alleviate domain shifts, while traditional Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) techniques suffer from catastrophic forgetting and privacy concerns. To address these limitations, we explore Source-Free Class Incremental Domain Adaptation (SFCIDA) and propose a novel approach, Quantifying Samples with Invariance (QSI), for this scenario. Our proposed method involves two main strategies: (1) Semantic Restructuring. We identify confusing source category pairs and restructure images to create a negative dataset that is semantically similar to the source features, refining accurate decision boundary among source categories. (2) Invariance Quantification. The sample's confidence is then quantified by its spatial location under the special data distribution, reflecting the trade-off between invariant features and domain shifts. Guided by such strategy, samples' confidence is accumulated for the target model to prioritize reliable categories, not only mitigating the poor performance of experience replay in unsupervised scenarios, but alleviating distribution discrepancies simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods, establishing new state-of-the-art performance on the Office-31, Office-Home and DomainNet-126 datasets, with average accuracy improvements of over 7.3%, 4.9% and 10.2% respectively.