Uncertainty Modeling for Robust Domain Adaptation Under Noisy Environments

In this paper, we tackle the task of domain adaptation under noisy environments; this is a practical and challenging problem in which the source domain is corrupted with noise in its labels, its features, or both. Noise in the source domain leads to inaccurate visual representations and makes it harder to estimate and reduce the domain discrepancy between the source and target domains, resulting in severe performance degradation in the target domain. These challenges can be addressed with offline source sample selection following robust domain discrepancy reduction. To achieve reliable sample selection, we model the uncertainty in the predictions of a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier and reweight the classification loss by this uncertainty. Such a reweighting mechanism reduces the contribution of noise, leading to improved noise robustness. We further propose UncertaintyRank, a novel regularizer, to encourage the uncertainty to be more sensitive to noisy labels, as label corruption brings more severe degradation. The uncertainty is also aggregated with the classification loss to eliminate the adverse effects of noisy representations while estimating the domain discrepancy. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method and verify that it performs favorably against existing state-of-the-art methods.