2025/02/05 by Dongmian Zou, von Seeger, Anneke, Gilad Lerman +2
Computer Science · #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.03587
openalex publication_date 2025/02/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to improve model performance on an unlabeled target domain using a related, labeled source domain. A common approach aligns source and target feature distributions by minimizing a distance between them, often using symmetric measures such as maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). However, these methods struggle when target data is scarce. We propose a novel UDA framework that leverages Stein discrepancy, an asymmetric measure that depends on the target distribution only through its score function, making it particularly suitable for low-data target regimes. Our proposed method has kernelized and adversarial forms and supports flexible modeling of the target distribution via Gaussian, GMM, or VAE models. We derive a generalization bound on the target error and a convergence rate for the empirical Stein discrepancy in the two-sample setting. Empirically, our method consistently outperforms prior UDA approaches under limited target data across multiple benchmarks.