  Domain adaptation is crucial in many real-world applications where the
distribution of the training data differs from the distribution of the test
data. Previous Deep Learning-based approaches to domain adaptation need to be
trained jointly on source and target domain data and are therefore unappealing
in scenarios where models need to be adapted to a large number of domains or
where a domain is evolving, e.g. spam detection where attackers continuously
change their tactics.
  To fill this gap, we propose Knowledge Adaptation, an extension of Knowledge
Distillation (Bucilua et al., 2006; Hinton et al., 2015) to the domain
adaptation scenario. We show how a student model achieves state-of-the-art
results on unsupervised domain adaptation from multiple sources on a standard
sentiment analysis benchmark by taking into account the domain-specific
expertise of multiple teachers and the similarities between their domains.
  When learning from a single teacher, using domain similarity to gauge
trustworthiness is inadequate. To this end, we propose a simple metric that
correlates well with the teacher's accuracy in the target domain. We
demonstrate that incorporating high-confidence examples selected by this metric
enables the student model to achieve state-of-the-art performance in the
single-source scenario.
