On the Benefits of Selectivity in Pseudo-Labeling for Unsupervised Multi-Source-Free Domain Adaptation

Due to privacy, storage, and other constraints, there is a growing need for unsupervised domain adaptation techniques in machine learning that do not require access to the data used to train a collection of source models. Existing methods for such multi-source-free domain adaptation typically train a target model using supervised techniques in conjunction with pseudo-labels for the target data, which are produced by the available source models. However, we show that assigning pseudo-labels to only a subset of the target data leads to improved performance. In particular, we develop an information-theoretic bound on the generalization error of the resulting target model that demonstrates an inherent bias-variance trade-off controlled by the subset choice. Guided by this analysis, we develop a method that partitions the target data into pseudo-labeled and unlabeled subsets to balance the trade-off. In addition to exploiting the pseudo-labeled subset, our algorithm further leverages the information in the unlabeled subset via a traditional unsupervised domain adaptation feature alignment procedure. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.