Fast Batch Nuclear-norm Maximization and Minimization for Robust Domain Adaptation

Due to the domain discrepancy in visual domain adaptation, the performance of source model degrades when bumping into the high data density near decision boundary in target domain. A common solution is to minimize the Shannon Entropy to push the decision boundary away from the high density area. However, entropy minimization also leads to severe reduction of prediction diversity, and unfortunately brings harm to the domain adaptation. In this paper, we investigate the prediction discriminability and diversity by studying the structure of the classification output matrix of a randomly selected data batch. We find by theoretical analysis that the prediction discriminability and diversity could be separately measured by the Frobenius-norm and rank of the batch output matrix. The nuclear-norm is an upperbound of the former, and a convex approximation of the latter. Accordingly, we propose Batch Nuclear-norm Maximization and Minimization, which performs nuclear-norm maximization on the target output matrix to enhance the target prediction ability, and nuclear-norm minimization on the source batch output matrix to increase applicability of the source domain knowledge. We further approximate the nuclear-norm by L_{1,2}-norm, and design multi-batch optimization for stable solution on large number of categories. The fast approximation method achieves O(n^2) computational complexity and better convergence property. Experiments show that our method could boost the adaptation accuracy and robustness under three typical domain adaptation scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/cuishuhao/BNM.