# Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.02560 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/

## Key facts

- Cited by 683 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 683)

- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [Efficient Test-Time Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02610/) (2022)
- [Towards Stable Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Wild World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12400/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15597/) (2021)
- [Robust Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13899/) (2023)
- [MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01322/) (2022)
- [Exploiting the Intrinsic Neighborhood Structure for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04202/) (2021)
- [Generalized Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01614/) (2021)
- [Mulberry: Empowering MLLM with o1-like Reasoning and Reflection via Collective Monte Carlo Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18319/) (2024)
- [FSDR: Frequency Space Domain Randomization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02370/) (2021)
- [ST3D: Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05346/) (2021)
- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [Towards Foundation Models for Scientific Machine Learning: Characterizing Scaling and Transfer Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00258/) (2023)
- [CDTrans: Cross-domain Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06165/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptation via Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06687/) (2022)
- [Cycle Self-Training for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03571/) (2021)
- [Deep Subdomain Adaptation Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09388/) (2021)
- [Source-free Domain Adaptation via Avatar Prototype Generation and Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15326/) (2021)
- [MeGA-CDA: Memory Guided Attention for Category-Aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04224/) (2021)
- [AdaMatch: A Unified Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning and Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04732/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11803/) (2023)
- [Deep Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Review of Recent Advances and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07422/) (2022)
- [SPG: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection via Semantic Point Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06709/) (2021)
- [Attracting and Dispersing: A Simple Approach for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04183/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Object Detectors: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13502/) (2021)
- [Domain Impression: A Source Data Free Domain Adaptation Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09003/) (2021)
- [Extending the WILDS Benchmark for Unsupervised Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05090/) (2021)
- [A Closer Look at Smoothness in Domain Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08213/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we present a method for unsupervised domain adaptation. Many adversarial learning methods train domain classifier networks to distinguish the features as either a source or target and train a feature generator network to mimic the discriminator. Two problems exist with these methods. First, the domain classifier only tries to distinguish the features as a source or target and thus does not consider task-specific decision boundaries between classes. Therefore, a trained generator can generate ambiguous features near class boundaries. Second, these methods aim to completely match the feature distributions between different domains, which is difficult because of each domain's characteristics. To solve these problems, we introduce a new approach that attempts to align distributions of source and target by utilizing the task-specific decision boundaries. We propose to maximize the discrepancy between two classifiers' outputs to detect target samples that are far from the support of the source. A feature generator learns to generate target features near the support to minimize the discrepancy. Our method outperforms other methods on several datasets of image classification and semantic segmentation. The codes are available at urlhttps://github.com/mil-tokyo/MCDDA