# ToAlign: Task-oriented Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10812 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10812/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Deep Inside Convolutional Networks: Visualising Image Classification Models and Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6034/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06924/) (2017)
- [Return of Frustratingly Easy Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05547/) (2015)
- [Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Minimax Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06487/) (2019)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [Multi-Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02176/) (2018)
- [Central Moment Discrepancy (CMD) for Domain-Invariant Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08811/) (2017)
- [Generate To Adapt: Aligning Domains using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01705/) (2017)
- [Sim-to-Real via Sim-to-Sim: Data-efficient Robotic Grasping via Randomized-to-Canonical Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07252/) (2018)
- [Towards Discriminability and Diversity: Batch Nuclear-norm Maximization under Label Insufficient Situations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12237/) (2020)
- [Gradually Vanishing Bridge for Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13183/) (2020)
- [Differential Treatment for Stuff and Things: A Simple Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08040/) (2020)
- [Domain-Symmetric Networks for Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04663/) (2019)
- [Deep Cocktail Network: Multi-source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Category Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00830/) (2018)
- [Domain Agnostic Learning with Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12347/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training For Time Series via Time-Frequency Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08496/) (2022)
- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [CoCo: A Coupled Contrastive Framework for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04979/) (2023)
- [Deep Frequency Filtering for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12198/) (2022)
- [Domain-Agnostic Mutual Prompting for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02899/) (2024)
- [Feature Distribution Matching for Federated Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11635/) (2022)
- [GeoNet: Benchmarking Unsupervised Adaptation across Geographies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15443/) (2023)
- [MemSAC: Memory Augmented Sample Consistency for Large Scale Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12389/) (2022)
- [Make the U in UDA Matter: Invariant Consistency Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12742/) (2023)
- [CARLANE: A Lane Detection Benchmark for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation from Simulation to multiple Real-World Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08083/) (2022)
- [Normalization Perturbation: A Simple Domain Generalization Method for Real-World Domain Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04393/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic Contrastive Learning for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06021/) (2021)
- [UDA-Bench: Revisiting Common Assumptions in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Using a Standardized Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15264/) (2024)
- [Degree-Conscious Spiking Graph for Cross-Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06883/) (2024)
- [Low-confidence Samples Matter for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02802/) (2022)
- [Incorporating Geo-Diverse Knowledge into Prompting for Increased Geographical Robustness in Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01482/) (2024)
- [Tell, Don't Show!: Language Guidance Eases Transfer Across Domains in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05535/) (2024)
- [Semantic-aware Message Broadcasting for Efficient Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02739/) (2022)
- [Graph Harmony: Denoising and Nuclear-Norm Wasserstein Adaptation for Enhanced Domain Transfer in Graph-Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12361/) (2023)
- [Sparse Causal Discovery with Generative Intervention for Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07621/) (2025)
- [Rein++: Efficient Generalization and Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01667/) (2025)
- [TYrPPG: Uncomplicated and Enhanced Learning Capability rPPG for Remote Heart Rate Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05833/) (2025)
- [Prompt Ensemble Self-training for Open-Vocabulary Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16658/) (2023)
- [Trustworthy Representation Learning Across Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12315/) (2023)
- [Domain Adaptive Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13536/) (2023)
- [Pick up the PACE: Fast and Simple Domain Adaptation via Ensemble Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13508/) (2022)
- [Multi-Scale Multi-Target Domain Adaptation for Angle Closure Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12157/) (2022)
- [Imbalance-Agnostic Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Avatar Prototype Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12649/) (2023)
- [Towards Unsupervised Representation Learning: Learning, Evaluating and Transferring Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00101/) (2023)
- [Core Knowledge Learning Framework for Graph Adaptation and Scalability Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01886/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptive classifcation intends to improve the classifcation performance on unlabeled target domain. To alleviate the adverse effect of domain shift, many approaches align the source and target domains in the feature space. However, a feature is usually taken as a whole for alignment without explicitly making domain alignment proactively serve the classifcation task, leading to sub-optimal solution. In this paper, we propose an effective Task-oriented Alignment (ToAlign) for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). We study what features should be aligned across domains and propose to make the domain alignment proactively serve classifcation by performing feature decomposition and alignment under the guidance of the prior knowledge induced from the classifcation task itself. Particularly, we explicitly decompose a feature in the source domain into a task-related/discriminative feature that should be aligned, and a task-irrelevant feature that should be avoided/ignored, based on the classifcation meta-knowledge. Extensive experimental results on various benchmarks (e.g., Offce-Home, Visda-2017, and DomainNet) under different domain adaptation settings demonstrate the effectiveness of ToAlign which helps achieve the state-of-the-art performance. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/UDA