# Selection, Ensemble, and Adaptation: Advancing Multi-Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Architecture Zoo

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01582 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01582/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Universal Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04393/) (2020)
- [Learning De-biased Representations with Biased Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02806/) (2019)
- [LEEP: A New Measure to Evaluate Transferability of Learned Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12462/) (2020)
- [Exploiting the Intrinsic Neighborhood Structure for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04202/) (2021)
- [Source Data-absent Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Hypothesis Transfer and Labeling Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07297/) (2020)
- [LogME: Practical Assessment of Pre-trained Models for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11005/) (2021)
- [Transferability and Hardness of Supervised Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08142/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Multi-source Domain Adaptation Without Access to Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01845/) (2021)
- [Minimal-Entropy Correlation Alignment for Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10288/) (2017)
- [The Shape of Learning Curves: a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10948/) (2021)
- [Divide and Contrast: Source-free Domain Adaptation via Adaptive Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06612/) (2022)
- [KD3A: Unsupervised Multi-Source Decentralized Domain Adaptation via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09757/) (2020)
- [Predicting Out-of-Distribution Error with the Projection Norm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05834/) (2022)
- [Frustratingly Easy Transferability Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09362/) (2021)
- [Tune it the Right Way: Unsupervised Validation of Domain Adaptation via Soft Neighborhood Density](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10860/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diverse Model Selection for Accessible Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06977/) (2021)
- [Transferability Metrics for Selecting Source Model Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13011/) (2021)
- [Energy-based Automated Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12689/) (2024)
- [On Balancing Bias and Variance in Unsupervised Multi-Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00796/) (2022)

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

- [Bayesian Test-time Adaptation for Object Recognition and Detection with Vision-language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02750/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Conventional Multi-Source Free Domain Adaptation (MSFDA) assumes that each source domain provides a single source model, and all source models adopt a uniform architecture. This paper introduces Zoo-MSFDA, a more general setting that allows each source domain to offer a zoo of multiple source models with different architectures. While it enriches the source knowledge, Zoo-MSFDA risks being dominated by suboptimal/harmful models. To address this issue, we theoretically analyze the model selection problem in Zoo-MSFDA, and introduce two principles: transferability principle and diversity principle. Recognizing the challenge of measuring transferability, we subsequently propose a novel Source-Free Unsupervised Transferability Estimation (SUTE). It enables assessing and comparing transferability across multiple source models with different architectures under domain shift, without requiring target labels and source data. Based on above, we introduce a Selection, Ensemble, and Adaptation (SEA) framework to address Zoo-MSFDA, which consists of: 1) source models selection based on the proposed principles and SUTE; 2) ensemble construction based on SUTE-estimated transferability; 3) target-domain adaptation of the ensemble model. Evaluations demonstrate that our SEA framework, with the introduced Zoo-MSFDA setting, significantly improves adaptation performance (e.g., 13.5% on DomainNet). Additionally, our SUTE achieves state-of-the-art performance in transferability estimation.