# Transferrable Contrastive Learning for Visual Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07516 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07516/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [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)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Deep Transfer Learning with Joint Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06636/) (2016)
- [Domain Generalization by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06864/) (2019)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Residual Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04433/) (2016)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05424/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Domain Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01805/) (2019)
- [Progressive Feature Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08585/) (2018)
- [Deep Reconstruction-Classification Networks for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03516/) (2016)
- [Mind the Class Weight Bias: Weighted Maximum Mean Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00609/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Domain Generalization in Computational Pathology: Survey and Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19656/) (2023)
- [Label-Efficient Domain Generalization via Collaborative Exploration and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03644/) (2022)
- [Improving Pseudo Labels With Intra-Class Similarity for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12139/) (2022)
- [Making the Best of Both Worlds: A Domain-Oriented Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01195/) (2022)
- [Delving into the Continuous Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13121/) (2022)
- [Emo-DNA: Emotion Decoupling and Alignment Learning for Cross-Corpus Speech Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02190/) (2023)
- [Jacobian Norm for Unsupervised Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03467/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Historical Learning: Learning Models with Learning History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12992/) (2023)
- [Explaining Cross-Domain Recognition with Interpretable Deep Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08249/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Emotional Semantic Gap via Multimodal Relevance Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01555/) (2023)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12807/) (2022)
- [Generalization Beyond Feature Alignment: Concept Activation-Guided Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06843/) (2022)
- [Model-Contrastive Federated Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10432/) (2023)
- [From Entanglement to Alignment: Representation Space Decomposition for Unsupervised Time Series Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20968/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently become the favorite among feature learning methodologies. It is therefore appealing for domain adaptation approaches to consider incorporating SSL. The intuition is to enforce instance-level feature consistency such that the predictor becomes somehow invariant across domains. However, most existing SSL methods in the regime of domain adaptation usually are treated as standalone auxiliary components, leaving the signatures of domain adaptation unattended. Actually, the optimal region where the domain gap vanishes and the instance level constraint that SSL peruses may not coincide at all. From this point, we present a particular paradigm of self-supervised learning tailored for domain adaptation, i.e., Transferrable Contrastive Learning (TCL), which links the SSL and the desired cross-domain transferability congruently. We find contrastive learning intrinsically a suitable candidate for domain adaptation, as its instance invariance assumption can be conveniently promoted to cross-domain class-level invariance favored by domain adaptation tasks. Based on particular memory bank constructions and pseudo label strategies, TCL then penalizes cross-domain intra-class domain discrepancy between source and target through a clean and novel contrastive loss. The free lunch is, thanks to the incorporation of contrastive learning, TCL relies on a moving-averaged key encoder that naturally achieves a temporally ensembled version of pseudo labels for target data, which avoids pseudo label error propagation at no extra cost. TCL therefore efficiently reduces cross-domain gaps. Through extensive experiments on benchmarks (Office-Home, VisDA-2017, Digits-five, PACS and DomainNet) for both single-source and multi-source domain adaptation tasks, TCL has demonstrated state-of-the-art performances.