# Curriculum Guided Domain Adaptation in the Dark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00956 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00956/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03530/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07394/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Self-labelling via simultaneous clustering and representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05371/) (2019)
- [Normalized Loss Functions for Deep Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13554/) (2020)
- [Multi-Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02176/) (2018)
- [Central Moment Discrepancy (CMD) for Domain-Invariant Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08811/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [Learning Discrete Representations via Information Maximizing Self-Augmented Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08720/) (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)
- [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)
- [Graph Optimal Transport for Cross-Domain Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14744/) (2020)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11257/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Unknown Sample Discovery for Source Free Open Set Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03767/) (2023)
- [Black-Box Time-Series Domain Adaptation via Cross-Prompt Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00487/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Addressing the rising concerns of privacy and security, domain adaptation in the dark aims to adapt a black-box source trained model to an unlabeled target domain without access to any source data or source model parameters. The need for domain adaptation of black-box predictors becomes even more pronounced to protect intellectual property as deep learning based solutions are becoming increasingly commercialized. Current methods distill noisy predictions on the target data obtained from the source model to the target model, and/or separate clean/noisy target samples before adapting using traditional noisy label learning algorithms. However, these methods do not utilize the easy-to-hard learning nature of the clean/noisy data splits. Also, none of the existing methods are end-to-end, and require a separate fine-tuning stage and an initial warmup stage. In this work, we present Curriculum Adaptation for Black-Box (CABB) which provides a curriculum guided adaptation approach to gradually train the target model, first on target data with high confidence (clean) labels, and later on target data with noisy labels. CABB utilizes Jensen-Shannon divergence as a better criterion for clean-noisy sample separation, compared to the traditional criterion of cross entropy loss. Our method utilizes co-training of a dual-branch network to suppress error accumulation resulting from confirmation bias. The proposed approach is end-to-end trainable and does not require any extra finetuning stage, unlike existing methods. Empirical results on standard domain adaptation datasets show that CABB outperforms existing state-of-the-art black-box DA models and is comparable to white-box domain adaptation models.