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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Satou, Hana, Mitkiy, Alan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12681
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author Satou, Hana
Mitkiy, Alan
author_facet Satou, Hana
Mitkiy, Alan
contents Transfer learning across domains with distribution shift remains a fundamental challenge in building robust and adaptable machine learning systems. While adversarial perturbations are traditionally viewed as threats that expose model vulnerabilities, recent studies suggest that they can also serve as constructive tools for data augmentation. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of adversarial data augmentation (ADA) in enhancing both robustness and adaptivity in transfer learning settings. We analyze how adversarial examples, when used strategically during training, improve domain generalization by enriching decision boundaries and reducing overfitting to source-domain-specific features. We further propose a unified framework that integrates ADA with consistency regularization and domain-invariant representation learning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets -- including VisDA, DomainNet, and Office-Home -- demonstrate that our method consistently improves target-domain performance under both unsupervised and few-shot domain adaptation settings. Our results highlight a constructive perspective of adversarial learning, transforming perturbation from a destructive attack into a regularizing force for cross-domain transferability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12681
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Mechanisms of Adversarial Data Augmentation for Robust and Adaptive Transfer Learning
Satou, Hana
Mitkiy, Alan
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Transfer learning across domains with distribution shift remains a fundamental challenge in building robust and adaptable machine learning systems. While adversarial perturbations are traditionally viewed as threats that expose model vulnerabilities, recent studies suggest that they can also serve as constructive tools for data augmentation. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of adversarial data augmentation (ADA) in enhancing both robustness and adaptivity in transfer learning settings. We analyze how adversarial examples, when used strategically during training, improve domain generalization by enriching decision boundaries and reducing overfitting to source-domain-specific features. We further propose a unified framework that integrates ADA with consistency regularization and domain-invariant representation learning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets -- including VisDA, DomainNet, and Office-Home -- demonstrate that our method consistently improves target-domain performance under both unsupervised and few-shot domain adaptation settings. Our results highlight a constructive perspective of adversarial learning, transforming perturbation from a destructive attack into a regularizing force for cross-domain transferability.
title On the Mechanisms of Adversarial Data Augmentation for Robust and Adaptive Transfer Learning
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12681