Class-imbalanced Domain Adaptation: An Empirical Odyssey

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation is a promising way to generalize deep models to novel domains. However, the current literature assumes that the label distribution is domain-invariant and only aligns the feature distributions or vice versa. In this work, we explore the more realistic task of Class-imbalanced Domain Adaptation: How to align feature distributions across domains while the label distributions of the two domains are also different? Taking a practical step towards this problem, we constructed the first benchmark with 22 cross-domain tasks from 6real-image datasets. We conducted comprehensive experiments on 10 recent domain adaptation methods and find most of them are very fragile in the face of coexisting feature and label distribution shift. Towards a better solution, we further proposed a feature and label distribution CO-ALignment (COAL) model with a novel combination of existing ideas. COAL is empirically shown to outperform the most recent domain adaptation methods on our benchmarks. We believe the provided benchmarks, empirical analysis results, and the COAL baseline could stimulate and facilitate future research towards this important problem.