Transferable Query Selection for Active Domain Adaptation

Abstract

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables transferring knowledge from a related source domain to a fully unlabeled target domain. Despite the significant advances in UDA, the performance gap remains quite large between UDA and supervised learning with fully labeled target data. Active domain adaptation (ADA) mitigates the gap under minimal annotation cost by selecting a small quota of target samples to annotate and incorporating them into training. Due to the domain shift, the query selection criteria of prior active learning methods may be ineffective to select the most informative target samples for annotation. In this paper, we propose Transferable Query Selection (TQS), which selects the most informative samples under domain shift by an ensemble of three new criteria: transferable committee, transferable uncertainty, and transferable domainness. We further develop a randomized selection algorithm to enhance the diversity of the selected samples. Experiments show that TQS remarkably outperforms previous UDA and ADA methods on several domain adaptation datasets. Deeper analyses demonstrate that TQS can select the most informative target samples under the domain shift.