# Adapt Anything: Tailor Any Image Classifiers across Domains And Categories Using Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16573 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16573/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 61 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06864/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05424/) (2016)
- [Transfer Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07888/) (2020)
- [Sliced Wasserstein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04064/) (2019)
- [Coupled Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07536/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Prompt-Free Conditional Diffusion for Multi-object Image Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06146/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We do not pursue a novel method in this paper, but aim to study if a modern text-to-image diffusion model can tailor any task-adaptive image classifier across domains and categories. Existing domain adaptive image classification works exploit both source and target data for domain alignment so as to transfer the knowledge learned from the labeled source data to the unlabeled target data. However, as the development of the text-to-image diffusion model, we wonder if the high-fidelity synthetic data from the text-to-image generator can serve as a surrogate of the source data in real world. In this way, we do not need to collect and annotate the source data for each domain adaptation task in a one-for-one manner. Instead, we utilize only one off-the-shelf text-to-image model to synthesize images with category labels derived from the corresponding text prompts, and then leverage the surrogate data as a bridge to transfer the knowledge embedded in the task-agnostic text-to-image generator to the task-oriented image classifier via domain adaptation. Such a one-for-all adaptation paradigm allows us to adapt anything in the world using only one text-to-image generator as well as the corresponding unlabeled target data. Extensive experiments validate the feasibility of the proposed idea, which even surpasses the state-of-the-art domain adaptation works using the source data collected and annotated in real world.