# SCoDA: Self-supervised Continual Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09935 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09935/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (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)
- [Source Data-absent Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Hypothesis Transfer and Labeling Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07297/) (2020)
- [Source-free Domain Adaptation via Avatar Prototype Generation and Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15326/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation with Frozen Multimodal Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16510/) (2023)
- [Divide and Contrast: Source-free Domain Adaptation via Adaptive Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06612/) (2022)
- [Adapt Your Teacher: Improving Knowledge Distillation for Exemplar-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09544/) (2023)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation Guided by Vision and Vision-Language Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02954/) (2024)
- [Learn from the Learnt: Source-Free Active Domain Adaptation via Contrastive Sampling and Visual Persistence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18899/) (2024)
- [Simple Unsupervised Knowledge Distillation With Space Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13939/) (2024)
- [CoSDA: Continual Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06627/) (2023)
- [Is user feedback always informative? Retrieval Latent Defending for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15383/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) addresses the challenge of adapting a model to a target domain without access to the data of the source domain. Prevailing methods typically start with a source model pre-trained with full supervision and distill the knowledge by aligning instance-level features. However, these approaches, relying on cosine similarity over L2-normalized feature vectors, inadvertently discard crucial geometric information about the latent manifold of the source model. We introduce Self-supervised Continual Domain Adaptation (SCoDA) to address these limitations. We make two key departures from standard practice: first, we avoid the reliance on supervised pre-training by initializing the proposed framework with a teacher model pre-trained entirely via self-supervision (SSL). Second, we adapt the principle of geometric manifold alignment to the SFDA setting. The student is trained with a composite objective combining instance-level feature matching with a Space Similarity Loss. To combat catastrophic forgetting, the teacher's parameters are updated via an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) of the student's parameters. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCoDA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art SFDA methods.