# VirDA: Reusing Backbone for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Visual Reprogramming

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01660/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [Coordinate Attention for Efficient Mobile Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02907/) (2021)
- [Vision GNN: An Image is Worth Graph of Nodes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00272/) (2022)
- [Generate To Adapt: Aligning Domains using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01705/) (2017)
- [Progressive Feature Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08585/) (2018)
- [Correlation Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01939/) (2016)
- [Towards Discriminability and Diversity: Batch Nuclear-norm Maximization under Label Insufficient Situations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12237/) (2020)
- [Gradually Vanishing Bridge for Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13183/) (2020)
- [CDTrans: Cross-domain Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06165/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptation via Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06687/) (2022)
- [Cross-Domain Adaptive Teacher for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13216/) (2021)
- [FixBi: Bridging Domain Spaces for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09230/) (2020)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning for Test-time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04831/) (2022)
- [Prototypical Cross-domain Self-supervised Learning for Few-shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16765/) (2021)
- [TVT: Transferable Vision Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05988/) (2021)

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

- [CRISP: Compositional Relations as Invariant Structural Priors for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06043/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing UDA pipelines fine-tune already well-trained backbone parameters for every new source-and-target pair, resulting in the number of training parameters and storage memory growing linearly with each new pair, and also preventing the reuse of these well-trained backbone parameters. Inspired by recent implications that existing backbones have textural biases, we propose making use of domain-specific textural bias for domain adaptation via visual reprogramming, namely VirDA. Instead of fine-tuning the full backbone, VirDA prepends a domain-specific visual reprogramming layer to the backbone. This layer produces visual prompts that act as an added textural bias to the input image, adapting its "style" to a target domain. To optimize these visual reprogramming layers, we use multiple objective functions that optimize the intra- and inter-domain distribution differences when domain-adapting visual prompts are applied. This process does not require modifying the backbone parameters, allowing the same backbone to be reused across different domains. We evaluate VirDA on Office-31 and obtain 92.8% mean accuracy with only 1.5M trainable parameters. VirDA surpasses PDA, the state-of-the-art parameter-efficient UDA baseline, by +1.6% accuracy while using just 46% of its parameters. Compared with full-backbone fine-tuning, VirDA outperforms CDTrans and FixBi by +0.2% and +1.4%, respectively, while requiring only 1.7% and 2.8% of their trainable parameters. Relative to the strongest current methods (PMTrans and TVT), VirDA uses ~1.7% of their parameters and trades off only 2.2% and 1.1% accuracy, respectively.