  The objective of unsupervised domain adaptation is to leverage features from
a labeled source domain and learn a classifier for an unlabeled target domain,
with a similar but different data distribution. Most deep learning approaches
to domain adaptation consist of two steps: (i) learn features that preserve a
low risk on labeled samples (source domain) and (ii) make the features from
both domains to be as indistinguishable as possible, so that a classifier
trained on the source can also be applied on the target domain. In general, the
classifiers in step (i) consist of fully-connected layers applied directly on
the indistinguishable features learned in (ii). In this paper, we propose a
different way to do the classification, using similarity learning. The proposed
method learns a pairwise similarity function in which classification can be
performed by computing similarity between prototype representations of each
category. The domain-invariant features and the categorical prototype
representations are learned jointly and in an end-to-end fashion. At inference
time, images from the target domain are compared to the prototypes and the
label associated with the one that best matches the image is outputed. The
approach is simple, scalable and effective. We show that our model achieves
state-of-the-art performance in different unsupervised domain adaptation
scenarios.
