Optimal transport for domain adaptation

Speaker: Alain Rakotomamonjy (Université de Rouen)

Date: May 11, 2016

Abstract:
Domain adaptation addresses one of the most challenging tasks in machine learning : coping with mismatch between learning and testing probability distributions. If adaptation is done correctly, models learned on a specific data representation become more robust when confronted to data depicting the same problems, but described through another observation system. Among the many strategies proposed, finding domain-invariant representations has shown excellent properties, in particular since it allows to train a unique classifier effective in all domains. In this talk, we propose a regularized unsupervised optimal transportation model to perform the alignment of the representations in the source and target domains. We learn a transportation plan matching both PDFs, which constrains labeled samples of the same class in the source domain to remain close during transport. This way, we exploit at the same time the few labeled samples in the source domain as well as the data distributions observed in both domains. Experiments on toy and challenging real visual adaptation examples show the interest of the method, that consistently outperforms state of the art approaches. In addition, numerical experiments show that our approach leads to better performances on domain invariant deep learning features and can be easily adapted to the semi-supervised case where few labeled samples are available in the target domain.