# A General Approach to Domain Adaptation with Applications in Astronomy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.08839 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08839/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [DeepAstroUDA: Semi-Supervised Universal Domain Adaptation for Cross-Survey Galaxy Morphology Classification and Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02005/) (2023)
- [Domain Adaptive Graph Neural Networks for Constraining Cosmological Parameters Across Multiple Data Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01588/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation for Cross-Survey Galaxy Morphology Classification and Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00677/) (2022)
- [Locating Hidden Exoplanets in ALMA Data Using Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09541/) (2022)
- [SIDDA: SInkhorn Dynamic Domain Adaptation for Image Classification with Equivariant Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14048/) (2025)
- [From Simulations to Surveys: Domain Adaptation for Galaxy Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18590/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability to build a model on a source task and subsequently adapt such model on a new target task is a pervasive need in many astronomical applications. The problem is generally known as transfer learning in machine learning, where domain adaptation is a popular scenario. An example is to build a predictive model on spectroscopic data to identify Supernovae IA, while subsequently trying to adapt such model on photometric data. In this paper we propose a new general approach to domain adaptation that does not rely on the proximity of source and target distributions. Instead we simply assume a strong similarity in model complexity across domains, and use active learning to mitigate the dependency on source examples. Our work leads to a new formulation for the likelihood as a function of empirical error using a theoretical learning bound; the result is a novel mapping from generalization error to a likelihood estimation. Results using two real astronomical problems, Supernova Ia classification and identification of Mars landforms, show two main advantages with our approach: increased accuracy performance and substantial savings in computational cost.