# Learning Unbiased Transferability for Domain Adaptation by Uncertainty Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.01319 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01319/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [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)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Optimal Transport for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.00504/) (2015)
- [DeCAF: A Deep Convolutional Activation Feature for Generic Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.1531/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Minimax Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06487/) (2019)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06329/) (2021)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [Progressive Feature Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08585/) (2018)
- [Multiplicative Normalizing Flows for Variational Bayesian Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01961/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Towards Discriminability and Diversity: Batch Nuclear-norm Maximization under Label Insufficient Situations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12237/) (2020)
- [Cycle Self-Training for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03571/) (2021)
- [Importance Weighted Adversarial Nets for Partial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09210/) (2018)
- [Dense Label Encoding for Boundary Discontinuity Free Rotation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09670/) (2020)
- [Maximum Density Divergence for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12615/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Domain-Adaptive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13893/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Hallucinations to Reduce Manual Prompt Dependency in Promptable Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15205/) (2024)
- [Learning Transferable Conceptual Prototypes for Interpretable Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08071/) (2023)
- [COD: Learning Conditional Invariant Representation for Domain Adaptation Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06638/) (2024)
- [Concept-Based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05195/) (2025)
- [INT: Instance-Specific Negative Mining for Task-Generic Promptable Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18753/) (2025)
- [D3GU: Multi-Target Active Domain Adaptation via Enhancing Domain Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05465/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-quantified Rollout Policy Adaptation for Unlabelled Cross-domain Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06317/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain adaptation (DA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled or a less labeled but related target domain. Ideally, the source and target distributions should be aligned to each other equally to achieve unbiased knowledge transfer. However, due to the significant imbalance between the amount of annotated data in the source and target domains, usually only the target distribution is aligned to the source domain, leading to adapting unnecessary source specific knowledge to the target domain, i.e., biased domain adaptation. To resolve this problem, in this work, we delve into the transferability estimation problem in domain adaptation and propose a non-intrusive Unbiased Transferability Estimation Plug-in (UTEP) by modeling the uncertainty of a discriminator in adversarial-based DA methods to optimize unbiased transfer. We theoretically analyze the effectiveness of the proposed approach to unbiased transferability learning in DA. Furthermore, to alleviate the impact of imbalanced annotated data, we utilize the estimated uncertainty for pseudo label selection of unlabeled samples in the target domain, which helps achieve better marginal and conditional distribution alignments between domains. Extensive experimental results on a high variety of DA benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach can be readily incorporated into various adversarial-based DA methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance.