SWAT: Sliding Window Adversarial Training for Gradual Domain Adaptation (2501.19155v1)

Abstract: Domain shifts are critical issues that harm the performance of machine learning. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) mitigates this issue but suffers when the domain shifts are steep and drastic. Gradual Domain Adaptation (GDA) alleviates this problem in a mild way by gradually adapting from the source to the target domain using multiple intermediate domains. In this paper, we propose Sliding Window Adversarial Training (SWAT) for Gradual Domain Adaptation. SWAT uses the construction of adversarial streams to connect the feature spaces of the source and target domains. In order to gradually narrow the small gap between adjacent intermediate domains, a sliding window paradigm is designed that moves along the adversarial stream. When the window moves to the end of the stream, i.e., the target domain, the domain shift is drastically reduced. Extensive experiments are conducted on public GDA benchmarks, and the results demonstrate that the proposed SWAT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. The implementation is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SWAT-8677.