Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation via Correlative and Discriminative Feature Learning

Heterogeneous domain adaptation seeks to learn an effective classifier or regression model for unlabeled target samples by using the well-labeled source samples but residing in different feature spaces and lying different distributions. Most recent works have concentrated on learning domain-invariant feature representations to minimize the distribution divergence via target pseudo-labels. However, two critical issues need to be further explored: 1) new feature representations should be not only domain-invariant but also category-correlative and discriminative, and 2) alleviating the negative transfer caused by the incorrect pseudo-labeling target samples could boost the adaptation performance during the iterative learning process. To address these issues, in this paper, we put forward a novel heterogeneous domain adaptation method to learn category-correlative and discriminative representations, referred to as correlative and discriminative feature learning (CDFL). Specifically, CDFL aims to learn a feature space where class-specific feature correlations between the source and target domains are maximized, the divergences of marginal and conditional distribution between the source and target domains are minimized, and the distances of inter-class distribution are forced to be maximized to ensure the discriminative ability. Meanwhile, a selective pseudo-labeling procedure based on the correlation coefficient and classifier prediction is introduced to boost class-specific feature correlation and discriminative distribution alignment in an iteration way. Extensive experiments certify that CDFL outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on five standard benchmarks.