DFA: Decoupling Feature Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

A prevailing assumption in existing deep learning research posits that data across source and target domains adhere to the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption. However, this assumption often proves inadequate in real-world scenarios, leading to significant performance degradation when models encounter data with divergent distributions. To address this challenge, a novel unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) algorithm, decoupling feature alignment (DFA), is introduced. The approach begins with the establishment of a robust theoretical framework, serving as the foundation for the mean-covariance adjustment feature alignment (MCAFA) algorithm. Simultaneously, a data decoupling (DD) module is introduced, effectively segregating target domain data into two subsets: one that mirrors the source domain and another that diverges markedly. Furthermore, a multidimensional alignment module is employed, leveraging the MCAFA algorithm and the DD module to align target data with source data across various layers and categories. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple data sets underscore the superiority of DFA.