What you saw is not what you get: Domain adaptation using asymmetric kernel transforms

In real-world applications, “what you saw” during training is often not “what you get” during deployment: the distribution and even the type and dimensionality of features can change from one dataset to the next. In this paper, we address the problem of visual domain adaptation for transferring object models from one dataset or visual domain to another. We introduce ARC-t, a flexible model for supervised learning of non-linear transformations between domains. Our method is based on a novel theoretical result demonstrating that such transformations can be learned in kernel space. Unlike existing work, our model is not restricted to symmetric transformations, nor to features of the same type and dimensionality, making it applicable to a significantly wider set of adaptation scenarios than previous methods. Furthermore, the method can be applied to categories that were not available during training. We demonstrate the ability of our method to adapt object recognition models under a variety of situations, such as differing imaging conditions, feature types and codebooks.