# COSMo: CLIP Talks on Open-Set Multi-Target Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00397 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00397/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [Deep Transfer Learning with Joint Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06636/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Residual Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04433/) (2016)
- [Universal Domain Adaptation through Self Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07953/) (2020)
- [Open Set Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10427/) (2018)
- [Domain Adaptation via Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06687/) (2022)
- [On the Effectiveness of Image Rotation for Open Set Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12360/) (2020)
- [Towards Inheritable Models for Open-Set Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04388/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Multi-Target Domain Adaptation: An Information Theoretic Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11547/) (2018)
- [AD-CLIP: Adapting Domains in Prompt Space Using CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05659/) (2023)
- [LASP: Text-to-Text Optimization for Language-Aware Soft Prompting of Vision & Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01115/) (2022)
- [Learning Disentangled Semantic Representation for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11807/) (2020)
- [Multi-Target Domain Adaptation with Collaborative Consistency Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03418/) (2021)
- [Blending-target Domain Adaptation by Adversarial Meta-Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03389/) (2019)
- [Curriculum Graph Co-Teaching for Multi-Target Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00808/) (2021)
- [StyLIP: Multi-Scale Style-Conditioned Prompt Learning for CLIP-based Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09251/) (2023)
- [Unknown-Aware Domain Adversarial Learning for Open-Set Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07551/) (2022)
- [Unknown Prompt, the only Lacuna: Unveiling CLIP's Potential for Open Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00710/) (2024)
- [Multi-Target Adversarial Frameworks for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06962/) (2021)

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

- [CLIP-Powered Domain Generalization and Domain Adaptation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14280/) (2025)
- [CLIPoint3D: Language-Grounded Few-Shot Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20409/) (2026)
- [BioVLM: Routing Prompts, Not Parameters, for Cross-Modality Generalization in Biomedical VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17629/) (2026)
- [LFM: Leveraging Foundation Models for Source-Free Universal Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17653/) (2026)
- [Revisiting Diffusion Fine-Tuning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33716/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-Target Domain Adaptation (MTDA) entails learning domain-invariant information from a single source domain and applying it to multiple unlabeled target domains. Yet, existing MTDA methods predominantly focus on addressing domain shifts within visual features, often overlooking semantic features and struggling to handle unknown classes, resulting in what is known as Open-Set (OS) MTDA. While large-scale vision-language foundation models like CLIP show promise, their potential for MTDA remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces COSMo, a novel method that learns domain-agnostic prompts through source domain-guided prompt learning to tackle the MTDA problem in the prompt space. By leveraging a domain-specific bias network and separate prompts for known and unknown classes, COSMo effectively adapts across domain and class shifts. To the best of our knowledge, COSMo is the first method to address Open-Set Multi-Target DA (OSMTDA), offering a more realistic representation of real-world scenarios and addressing the challenges of both open-set and multi-target DA. COSMo demonstrates an average improvement of 5.1% across three challenging datasets: Mini-DomainNet, Office-31, and Office-Home, compared to other related DA methods adapted to operate within the OSMTDA setting. Code is available at: https://github.com/munish30monga/COSMo