  We study the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation, which aims to adapt
classifiers trained on a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain.
Many existing approaches first learn domain-invariant features and then
construct classifiers with them. We propose a novel approach that jointly learn
the both. Specifically, while the method identifies a feature space where data
in the source and the target domains are similarly distributed, it also learns
the feature space discriminatively, optimizing an information-theoretic metric
as an proxy to the expected misclassification error on the target domain. We
show how this optimization can be effectively carried out with simple
gradient-based methods and how hyperparameters can be cross-validated without
demanding any labeled data from the target domain. Empirical studies on
benchmark tasks of object recognition and sentiment analysis validated our
modeling assumptions and demonstrated significant improvement of our method
over competing ones in classification accuracies.
