# Domain Attention Consistency for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03911 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03911/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00976/) (2019)
- [Residual Attention Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06904/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Residual Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04433/) (2016)
- [Domain Adaptive Ensemble Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07325/) (2020)
- [Deep Cocktail Network: Multi-source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Category Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00830/) (2018)
- [HoMM: Higher-order Moment Matching for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11976/) (2019)
- [Multi-source Distilling Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11554/) (2019)
- [Curriculum Manager for Source Selection in Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01261/) (2020)
- [Learning to Combine: Knowledge Aggregation for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08801/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Weighted Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13814/) (2021)
- [Joint Domain Alignment and Discriminative Feature Learning for Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09347/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [ConfMix: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Object Detection via Confidence-based Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11539/) (2022)
- [Robust Target Training for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01676/) (2022)
- [DA-Mamba: Domain Adaptive Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Based One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11178/) (2025)
- [MLA-BIN: Model-level Attention and Batch-instance Style Normalization for Domain Generalization of Federated Learning on Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17008/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most existing multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA) methods minimize the distance between multiple source-target domain pairs via feature distribution alignment, an approach borrowed from the single source setting. However, with diverse source domains, aligning pairwise feature distributions is challenging and could even be counter-productive for MSDA. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach: transferable attribute learning. The motivation is simple: although different domains can have drastically different visual appearances, they contain the same set of classes characterized by the same set of attributes; an MSDA model thus should focus on learning the most transferable attributes for the target domain. Adopting this approach, we propose a domain attention consistency network, dubbed DAC-Net. The key design is a feature channel attention module, which aims to identify transferable features (attributes). Importantly, the attention module is supervised by a consistency loss, which is imposed on the distributions of channel attention weights between source and target domains. Moreover, to facilitate discriminative feature learning on the target data, we combine pseudo-labeling with a class compactness loss to minimize the distance between the target features and the classifier's weight vectors. Extensive experiments on three MSDA benchmarks show that our DAC-Net achieves new state of the art performance on all of them.