# Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Distilled Discriminative Clustering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11984 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11984/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [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)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Deep Visual Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03601/) (2018)
- [Deep Transfer Learning with Joint Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06636/) (2016)
- [On the Number of Linear Regions of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.1869/) (2014)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [Sliced Wasserstein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04064/) (2019)
- [Unifying distillation and privileged information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03643/) (2015)
- [A DIRT-T Approach to Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08735/) (2018)
- [Simultaneous Deep Transfer Across Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.02192/) (2015)
- [Domain-Specific Batch Normalization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03950/) (2019)
- [Multi-Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02176/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Asymmetric Tri-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08400/) (2017)
- [Learning Diverse and Discriminative Representations via the Principle of Maximal Coding Rate Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08558/) (2020)
- [Transferrable Prototypical Networks for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11227/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [A New Benchmark: On the Utility of Synthetic Data with Blender for Bare Supervised Learning and Downstream Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09165/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Domain Adaptation through Prompt Gradient Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09353/) (2024)
- [Preserving Clusters in Prompt Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11493/) (2025)
- [Towards Trustworthy Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Representation Learning Perspective for Enhancing Robustness, Discrimination, and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13180/) (2024)
- [Sequential Minimal Optimization Algorithm for One-Class Support Vector Machines With Privileged Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22210/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptation addresses the problem of classifying data in an unlabeled target domain, given labeled source domain data that share a common label space but follow a different distribution. Most of the recent methods take the approach of explicitly aligning feature distributions between the two domains. Differently, motivated by the fundamental assumption for domain adaptability, we re-cast the domain adaptation problem as discriminative clustering of target data, given strong privileged information provided by the closely related, labeled source data. Technically, we use clustering objectives based on a robust variant of entropy minimization that adaptively filters target data, a soft Fisher-like criterion, and additionally the cluster ordering via centroid classification. To distill discriminative source information for target clustering, we propose to jointly train the network using parallel, supervised learning objectives over labeled source data. We term our method of distilled discriminative clustering for domain adaptation as DisClusterDA. We also give geometric intuition that illustrates how constituent objectives of DisClusterDA help learn class-wisely pure, compact feature distributions. We conduct careful ablation studies and extensive experiments on five popular benchmark datasets, including a multi-source domain adaptation one. Based on commonly used backbone networks, DisClusterDA outperforms existing methods on these benchmarks. It is also interesting to observe that in our DisClusterDA framework, adding an additional loss term that explicitly learns to align class-level feature distributions across domains does harm to the adaptation performance, though more careful studies in different algorithmic frameworks are to be conducted.