# RDA: Robust Domain Adaptation via Fourier Adversarial Attacking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.02874 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02874/

## Key facts

- Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 76 of its 111 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [On Large-Batch Training for Deep Learning: Generalization Gap and Sharp Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04836/) (2016)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [The Concrete Distribution: A Continuous Relaxation of Discrete Random Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00712/) (2016)
- [Visualizing the Loss Landscape of Neural Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09913/) (2017)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08401/) (2016)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Deep Transfer Learning with Joint Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06636/) (2016)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [Fast Vision Transformers with HiLo Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13213/) (2022)
- [Transfer Learning from Synthetic to Real LiDAR Point Cloud for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05399/) (2021)
- [PolarMix: A General Data Augmentation Technique for LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00223/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptive 3D Detection with Multi-Level Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11355/) (2021)
- [Balancing Discriminability and Transferability for Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08009/) (2022)
- [Spectral Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06112/) (2021)
- [PASTA: Proportional Amplitude Spectrum Training Augmentation for Syn-to-Real Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00979/) (2022)
- [RobustSAM: Segment Anything Robustly on Degraded Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09627/) (2024)
- [Feature-based Style Randomization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03171/) (2021)
- [Unbiased Subclass Regularization for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10026/) (2022)
- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation: Two Decades of Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06378/) (2023)
- [Historical Test-time Prompt Tuning for Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20346/) (2024)
- [Domain Adaptive Video Segmentation via Temporal Consistency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11004/) (2021)
- [Concurrent Subsidiary Supervision for Unsupervised Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13247/) (2022)
- [Panacea: Mitigating Harmful Fine-tuning for Large Language Models via Post-fine-tuning Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18100/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Image Segmentation: a Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03241/) (2021)
- [ProSFDA: Prompt Learning based Source-free Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11514/) (2022)
- [Consistency Regularization for Generalizable Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01587/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Pseudo Label Self-Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16979/) (2023)
- [Decompose to Adapt: Cross-domain Object Detection via Feature Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01929/) (2022)
- [GenCo: Generative Co-training for Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01254/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Video Segmentation via Temporal Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02372/) (2022)
- [Black-box Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Bi-directional Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13236/) (2023)
- [Spatio-Temporal Pixel-Level Contrastive Learning-based Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Video Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14361/) (2023)
- [FoPro-KD: Fourier Prompted Effective Knowledge Distillation for Long-Tailed Medical Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17421/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection via Language Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20371/) (2024)
- [Imbalanced Open Set Domain Adaptation via Moving-threshold Estimation and Gradual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04393/) (2023)
- [Unified Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13254/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) involves a supervised loss in a labeled source domain and an unsupervised loss in an unlabeled target domain, which often faces more severe overfitting (than classical supervised learning) as the supervised source loss has clear domain gap and the unsupervised target loss is often noisy due to the lack of annotations. This paper presents RDA, a robust domain adaptation technique that introduces adversarial attacking to mitigate overfitting in UDA. We achieve robust domain adaptation by a novel Fourier adversarial attacking (FAA) method that allows large magnitude of perturbation noises but has minimal modification of image semantics, the former is critical to the effectiveness of its generated adversarial samples due to the existence of 'domain gaps'. Specifically, FAA decomposes images into multiple frequency components (FCs) and generates adversarial samples by just perturbating certain FCs that capture little semantic information. With FAA-generated samples, the training can continue the 'random walk' and drift into an area with a flat loss landscape, leading to more robust domain adaptation. Extensive experiments over multiple domain adaptation tasks show that RDA can work with different computer vision tasks with superior performance.