STEM: An approach to Multi-source Domain Adaptation with Guarantees

Multi-source Domain Adaptation (MSDA) is more practical but challenging than the conventional unsupervised domain adaptation due to the involvement of diverse multiple data sources. Two fundamental challenges of MSDA are: (i) how to deal with the diversity in the multiple source domains and (ii) how to cope with the data shift between the target domain and the source domains. In this paper, to address the first challenge, we propose a theoretical-guaranteed approach to combine domain experts locally trained on its own source domain to achieve a combined multi-source teacher that globally predicts well on the mixture of source domains. To address the second challenge, we propose to bridge the gap between the target domain and the mixture of source domains in the latent space via a generator or feature extractor. Together with bridging the gap in the latent space, we train a student to mimic the predictions of the teacher expert on both source and target examples. In addition, our approach is guaranteed with rigorous theory offered insightful justifications of how each component influences the transferring performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performances to the best of our knowledge.