Mitigating Negative Transfer via Reducing Environmental Disagreement

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation~(UDA) focuses on transferring knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, addressing the challenge of domain shift. Significant domain shifts hinder effective knowledge transfer, leading to negative transfer and deteriorating model performance. Therefore, mitigating negative transfer is essential. This study revisits negative transfer through the lens of causally disentangled learning, emphasizing cross-domain discriminative disagreement on non-causal environmental features as a critical factor. Our theoretical analysis reveals that overreliance on non-causal environmental features as the environment evolves can cause discriminative disagreements~(termed environmental disagreement), thereby resulting in negative transfer. To address this, we propose Reducing Environmental Disagreement~(RED), which disentangles each sample into domain-invariant causal features and domain-specific non-causal environmental features via adversarially training domain-specific environmental feature extractors in the opposite domains. Subsequently, RED estimates and reduces environmental disagreement based on domain-specific non-causal environmental features. Experimental results confirm that RED effectively mitigates negative transfer and achieves state-of-the-art performance.