# Unified Source-Free Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07601 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07601/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [Invariant Information Clustering for Unsupervised Image Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06653/) (2018)
- [VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06924/) (2017)
- [Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07511/) (2022)
- [Prompt-aligned Gradient for Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14865/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10377/) (2022)
- [Domain Generalization using Causal Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07500/) (2020)
- [Exploiting the Intrinsic Neighborhood Structure for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04202/) (2021)
- [Generalized Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01614/) (2021)
- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [Causality Inspired Representation Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14237/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptation via Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06687/) (2022)
- [Causality-inspired Single-source Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12525/) (2021)
- [Deep Clustering via Joint Convolutional Autoencoder Embedding and Relative Entropy Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06327/) (2017)
- [Align Your Prompts: Test-Time Prompting with Distribution Alignment for Zero-Shot Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01459/) (2023)
- [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)

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

- [Multi-Granularity Class Prototype Topology Distillation for Class-Incremental Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16064/) (2024)
- [Toward Robust Non-Transferable Learning: A Survey and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13593/) (2025)
- [Empowering Source-Free Domain Adaptation via MLLM-Guided Reliability-Based Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18376/) (2024)
- [Domain Adaptive Diabetic Retinopathy Grading with Model Absence and Flowing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01203/) (2024)
- [Autonomous Source Knowledge Selection in Multi-Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14710/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the pursuit of transferring a source model to a target domain without access to the source training data, Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) has been extensively explored across various scenarios, including Closed-set, Open-set, Partial-set, and Generalized settings. Existing methods, focusing on specific scenarios, not only address a limited subset of challenges but also necessitate prior knowledge of the target domain, significantly limiting their practical utility and deployability. In light of these considerations, we introduce a more practical yet challenging problem, termed unified SFDA, which comprehensively incorporates all specific scenarios in a unified manner. In this paper, we propose a novel approach latent Causal factors discovery for unified SFDA (CausalDA). In contrast to previous alternatives that emphasize learning the statistical description of reality, we formulate CausalDA from a causality perspective. The objective is to uncover potential causality between latent variables and model decisions, enhancing the reliability and robustness of the learned model against domain shifts. To integrate extensive world knowledge, we leverage a pre-trained vision-language model such as CLIP. This aids in the formation and discovery of latent causal factors in the absence of supervision in the variation of distribution and semantics, coupled with a newly designed information bottleneck with theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalDA can achieve new state-of-the-art results in distinct SFDA settings, as well as source-free out-of-distribution generalization. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/tntek/CausalDA.