# CDA: Contrastive-adversarial Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.03826 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03826/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [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)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [Reconciling modern machine learning practice and the bias-variance trade-off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11118/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Exploring Generalization in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08947/) (2017)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07035/) (2017)
- [Bayesian Deep Learning and a Probabilistic Perspective of Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08791/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06864/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02849/) (2018)
- [Debiased Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00224/) (2020)
- [Keystroke Dynamics as Part of Lifelogging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10144/) (2020)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [Multi-Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02176/) (2018)
- [Generate To Adapt: Aligning Domains using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01705/) (2017)
- [Demystifying Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning: Invariances, Augmentations and Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13916/) (2020)
- [Gradually Vanishing Bridge for Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13183/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Cross-domain Self-supervised Learning for Few-shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16765/) (2021)
- [CLDA: Contrastive Learning for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00085/) (2021)
- [Joint Domain Alignment and Discriminative Feature Learning for Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09347/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in domain adaptation reveal that adversarial learning on deep neural networks can learn domain invariant features to reduce the shift between source and target domains. While such adversarial approaches achieve domain-level alignment, they ignore the class (label) shift. When class-conditional data distributions are significantly different between the source and target domain, it can generate ambiguous features near class boundaries that are more likely to be misclassified. In this work, we propose a two-stage model for domain adaptation called Contrastive-adversarial Domain Adaptation (CDA). While the adversarial component facilitates domain-level alignment, two-stage contrastive learning exploits class information to achieve higher intra-class compactness across domains resulting in well-separated decision boundaries. Furthermore, the proposed contrastive framework is designed as a plug-and-play module that can be easily embedded with existing adversarial methods for domain adaptation. We conduct experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets for domain adaptation, namely, textitOffice-31 and textitDigits-5, and demonstrate that CDA achieves state-of-the-art results on both datasets.