  In the problem of domain transfer learning, we learn a model for the
predic-tion in a target domain from the data of both some source domains and
the target domain, where the target domain is in lack of labels while the
source domain has sufficient labels. Besides the instances of the data,
recently the attributes of data shared across domains are also explored and
proven to be very helpful to leverage the information of different domains. In
this paper, we propose a novel learning framework for domain-transfer learning
based on both instances and attributes. We proposed to embed the attributes of
dif-ferent domains by a shared convolutional neural network (CNN), learn a
domain-independent CNN model to represent the information shared by dif-ferent
domains by matching across domains, and a domain-specific CNN model to
represent the information of each domain. The concatenation of the three CNN
model outputs is used to predict the class label. An iterative algo-rithm based
on gradient descent method is developed to learn the parameters of the model.
The experiments over benchmark datasets show the advantage of the proposed
model.
