Stein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: von Seeger, Anneke, Zou, Dongmian, Lerman, Gilad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author von Seeger, Anneke
Zou, Dongmian
Lerman, Gilad
author_facet von Seeger, Anneke
Zou, Dongmian
Lerman, Gilad
contents Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to improve model performance on an unlabeled target domain using a related, labeled source domain. A common approach aligns source and target feature distributions by minimizing a distance between them, often using symmetric measures such as maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). However, these methods struggle when target data is scarce. We propose a novel UDA framework that leverages Stein discrepancy, an asymmetric measure that depends on the target distribution only through its score function, making it particularly suitable for low-data target regimes. Our proposed method has kernelized and adversarial forms and supports flexible modeling of the target distribution via Gaussian, GMM, or VAE models. We derive a generalization bound on the target error and a convergence rate for the empirical Stein discrepancy in the two-sample setting. Empirically, our method consistently outperforms prior UDA approaches under limited target data across multiple benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_03587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
von Seeger, Anneke
Zou, Dongmian
Lerman, Gilad
Machine Learning
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to improve model performance on an unlabeled target domain using a related, labeled source domain. A common approach aligns source and target feature distributions by minimizing a distance between them, often using symmetric measures such as maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). However, these methods struggle when target data is scarce. We propose a novel UDA framework that leverages Stein discrepancy, an asymmetric measure that depends on the target distribution only through its score function, making it particularly suitable for low-data target regimes. Our proposed method has kernelized and adversarial forms and supports flexible modeling of the target distribution via Gaussian, GMM, or VAE models. We derive a generalization bound on the target error and a convergence rate for the empirical Stein discrepancy in the two-sample setting. Empirically, our method consistently outperforms prior UDA approaches under limited target data across multiple benchmarks.
title Stein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03587