# Transporting Causal Mechanisms for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.11055 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11055/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12359/) (2018)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Deep Domain Confusion: Maximizing for Domain Invariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3474/) (2014)
- [VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06924/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00976/) (2019)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [Domain Separation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06019/) (2016)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)
- [On the Generalization of Equivariance and Convolution in Neural Networks to the Action of Compact Groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03690/) (2018)
- [Towards a Definition of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02230/) (2018)
- [Multi-Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02176/) (2018)
- [Generate To Adapt: Aligning Domains using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01705/) (2017)
- [Image to Image Translation for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00479/) (2017)
- [Asymmetric Tri-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08400/) (2017)
- [Identifying Causal Effects With Proxy Variables of an Unmeasured Confounder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08816/) (2016)
- [Gradually Vanishing Bridge for Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13183/) (2020)
- [Domain-Symmetric Networks for Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04663/) (2019)
- [Robustly Disentangled Causal Mechanisms: Validating Deep Representations for Interventional Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00007/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Unbiased Multiple Instance Learning for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12369/) (2023)
- [Balancing Discriminability and Transferability for Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08009/) (2022)
- [Edge-Cloud Polarization and Collaboration: A Comprehensive Survey for AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06061/) (2021)
- [Invariant Feature Learning for Generalized Long-Tailed Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09504/) (2022)
- [Robust Generalization against Photon-Limited Corruptions via Worst-Case Sharpness Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13087/) (2023)
- [Unbiased Faster R-CNN for Single-source Domain Generalized Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15225/) (2024)
- [Causal Reasoning Meets Visual Representation Learning: A Prospective Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12037/) (2022)
- [Causal Transportability for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12363/) (2022)
- [MVDG: A Unified Multi-view Framework for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12329/) (2021)
- [PartMix: Regularization Strategy to Learn Part Discovery for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01537/) (2023)
- [Learning Distortion Invariant Representation for Image Restoration from A Causality Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06859/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Vicinal Space for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13353/) (2021)
- [Meta-Causal Feature Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10156/) (2022)
- [Video Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10412/) (2022)
- [Adapting to Latent Subgroup Shifts via Concepts and Proxies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11254/) (2022)
- [Causal reasoning in typical computer vision tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13992/) (2023)
- [Make the U in UDA Matter: Invariant Consistency Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12742/) (2023)
- [No Fair Lunch: A Causal Perspective on Dataset Bias in Machine Learning for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16526/) (2023)
- [Confounder Identification-free Causal Visual Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13420/) (2021)
- [Causal Inference via Style Transfer for Out-of-distribution Generalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03063/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic Contrastive Learning for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06021/) (2021)
- [Class Is Invariant to Context and Vice Versa: On Learning Invariance for Out-Of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03462/) (2022)
- [Unified Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07601/) (2024)
- [Learning Time-Aware Causal Representation for Model Generalization in Evolving Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17718/) (2025)
- [Low-confidence Samples Matter for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02802/) (2022)
- [Exploring Flat Minima for Domain Generalization with Large Learning Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06337/) (2023)
- [Do learned representations respect causal relationships?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00762/) (2022)
- [Do-Operation Guided Causal Representation Learning with Reduced Supervision Strength](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01802/) (2022)
- [SSL Framework for Causal Inconsistency between Structures and Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18634/) (2023)
- [Socialized Learning: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift for Edge Intelligence in Networked Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13348/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) literature adopts the covariate shift and conditional shift assumptions, which essentially encourage models to learn common features across domains. However, due to the lack of supervision in the target domain, they suffer from the semantic loss: the feature will inevitably lose non-discriminative semantics in source domain, which is however discriminative in target domain. We use a causal view -- transportability theory -- to identify that such loss is in fact a confounding effect, which can only be removed by causal intervention. However, the theoretical solution provided by transportability is far from practical for UDA, because it requires the stratification and representation of the unobserved confounder that is the cause of the domain gap. To this end, we propose a practical solution: Transporting Causal Mechanisms (TCM), to identify the confounder stratum and representations by using the domain-invariant disentangled causal mechanisms, which are discovered in an unsupervised fashion. Our TCM is both theoretically and empirically grounded. Extensive experiments show that TCM achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging UDA benchmarks: ImageCLEF-DA, Office-Home, and VisDA-2017. Codes are available in Appendix.