# Domain Adaptation via Prompt Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06687 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06687/

## Key facts

- Cited by 128 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [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)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Factual Probing Is [MASK]: Learning vs. Learning to Recall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05240/) (2021)
- [Sliced Wasserstein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04064/) (2019)
- [Central Moment Discrepancy (CMD) for Domain-Invariant Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08811/) (2017)
- [Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02035/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Ensemble Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07325/) (2020)
- [Transferrable Prototypical Networks for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11227/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Structurally Regularized Deep Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08607/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 128)

- [Domain Specialization as the Key to Make Large Language Models Disruptive: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18703/) (2023)
- [LoCoOp: Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection via Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01293/) (2023)
- [Decorate the Newcomers: Visual Domain Prompt for Continual Test Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04145/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning for Test-time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04831/) (2022)
- [PromptMRG: Diagnosis-Driven Prompts for Medical Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12604/) (2023)
- [Towards Large-scale 3D Representation Learning with Multi-dataset Point Prompt Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09718/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Attacks on Large Vision-Language Models: Resources, Advances, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07403/) (2024)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning for Generative Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00990/) (2022)
- [PromptKD: Unsupervised Prompt Distillation for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02781/) (2024)
- [Learning to Compose Soft Prompts for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03574/) (2022)
- [AD-CLIP: Adapting Domains in Prompt Space Using CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05659/) (2023)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation with Frozen Multimodal Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16510/) (2023)
- [Bayesian Prompt Learning for Image-Language Model Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02390/) (2022)
- [Texts as Images in Prompt Tuning for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12739/) (2022)
- [See, Think, Confirm: Interactive Prompting Between Vision and Language Models for Knowledge-based Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05226/) (2023)
- [Incorporating Structured Representations into Pretrained Vision & Language Models Using Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06343/) (2023)
- [DPCore: Dynamic Prompt Coreset for Continual Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10737/) (2024)
- [Domain-Agnostic Mutual Prompting for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02899/) (2024)
- [Enhancing CLIP with CLIP: Exploring Pseudolabeling for Limited-Label Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01669/) (2023)
- [Unified Language-driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07155/) (2024)
- [Exploring Sparse Visual Prompt for Domain Adaptive Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09792/) (2023)
- [DeltaEdit: Exploring Text-free Training for Text-Driven Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06285/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Generative Model Adaptation via Image-specific Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03119/) (2023)
- [Multi-Prompt Alignment for Multi-Source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15210/) (2022)
- [LeftRefill: Filling Right Canvas based on Left Reference through Generalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11577/) (2023)
- [Soft Prompt Generation for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19286/) (2024)
- [Advances in Multimodal Adaptation and Generalization: From Traditional Approaches to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18592/) (2025)
- [Domain-Controlled Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07730/) (2023)
- [Learning Expressive Prompting With Residuals for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15591/) (2023)
- [Proxy Denoising for Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01658/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaption (UDA) aims to adapt models learned from a well-annotated source domain to a target domain, where only unlabeled samples are given. Current UDA approaches learn domain-invariant features by aligning source and target feature spaces. Such alignments are imposed by constraints such as statistical discrepancy minimization or adversarial training. However, these constraints could lead to the distortion of semantic feature structures and loss of class discriminability. In this paper, we introduce a novel prompt learning paradigm for UDA, named Domain Adaptation via Prompt Learning (DAPL). In contrast to prior works, our approach makes use of pre-trained vision-language models and optimizes only very few parameters. The main idea is to embed domain information into prompts, a form of representations generated from natural language, which is then used to perform classification. This domain information is shared only by images from the same domain, thereby dynamically adapting the classifier according to each domain. By adopting this paradigm, we show that our model not only outperforms previous methods on several cross-domain benchmarks but also is very efficient to train and easy to implement.