# Rethinking the Role of Pre-Trained Networks in Source-Free Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07585 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07585/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2022.

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

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [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)
- [In Search of Lost Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01434/) (2020)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [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)
- [A Survey of Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02849/) (2018)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [Exploiting the Intrinsic Neighborhood Structure for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04202/) (2021)
- [Generalized Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01614/) (2021)
- [Source Data-absent Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Hypothesis Transfer and Labeling Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Structurally Regularized Deep Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08607/) (2020)
- [Gradually Vanishing Bridge for Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13183/) (2020)
- [FixBi: Bridging Domain Spaces for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09230/) (2020)
- [Source-free Domain Adaptation via Avatar Prototype Generation and Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15326/) (2021)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11257/) (2022)
- [Attracting and Dispersing: A Simple Approach for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04183/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01524/) (2020)
- [A Broad Study of Pre-training for Domain Generalization and Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11819/) (2022)
- [Towards Inheritable Models for Open-Set Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04388/) (2020)
- [Balancing Discriminability and Transferability for Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08009/) (2022)
- [Transferable Semantic Augmentation for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12562/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Noisy Label Learning for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11614/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-guided Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07591/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation Guided by Vision and Vision-Language Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02954/) (2024)
- [Split to Merge: Unifying Separated Modalities for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06946/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Video Domain Adaptation with Masked Pre-Training and Collaborative Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02914/) (2023)
- [De-Confusing Pseudo-Labels in Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01650/) (2024)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation with Diffusion-Guided Source Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04929/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Segment Anything Model for Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Dual Feature Guided Auto-Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08527/) (2025)
- [Incorporating Pre-training Data Matters in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03097/) (2023)
- [ViLAaD: Enhancing "Attracting and Dispersing'' Source-Free Domain Adaptation with Vision-and-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23529/) (2025)
- [High-order Neighborhoods Know More: HyperGraph Learning Meets Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06916/) (2024)
- [Autonomous Source Knowledge Selection in Multi-Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14710/) (2025)
- [Closing the Confusion Loop: CLIP-Guided Alignment for Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08730/) (2026)
- [Forgetting-Resistant and Lesion-Aware Source-Free Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Analysis with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19471/) (2026)
- [LUMOS: Latent Universal Medical Priors for Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01115/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a source model trained on a fully-labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Large-data pre-trained networks are used to initialize source models during source training, and subsequently discarded. However, source training can cause the model to overfit to source data distribution and lose applicable target domain knowledge. We propose to integrate the pre-trained network into the target adaptation process as it has diversified features important for generalization and provides an alternate view of features and classification decisions different from the source model. We propose to distil useful target domain information through a co-learning strategy to improve target pseudolabel quality for finetuning the source model. Evaluation on 4 benchmark datasets show that our proposed strategy improves adaptation performance and can be successfully integrated with existing SFDA methods. Leveraging modern pre-trained networks that have stronger representation learning ability in the co-learning strategy further boosts performance.