Papers › Domain Adaptation with Randomized Expectation Maximization

Domain Adaptation with Randomized Expectation Maximization

20 Mar 2018arXiv:1803.07634archive 2025-07-28

Twan van Laarhoven, Elena Marchiori

Domain adaptation (DA) is the task of classifying an unlabeled dataset (target) using a labeled dataset (source) from a related domain. The majority of successful DA methods try to directly match the distributions of the source and target data by transforming the feature space. Despite their success, state of the art methods based on this approach are either involved or unable to directly scale to data with many features. This article shows that domain adaptation can be successfully performed by using a very simple randomized expectation maximization (EM) method. We consider two instances of the method, which involve logistic regression and support vector machine, respectively. The underlying assumption of the proposed method is the existence of a good single linear classifier for both source and target domain. The potential limitations of this assumption are alleviated by the flexibility of the method, which can directly incorporate deep features extracted from a pre-trained deep neural network. The resulting algorithm is strikingly easy to implement and apply. We test its performance on 36 real-life adaptation tasks over text and image data with diverse characteristics. The method achieves state-of-the-art results, competitive with those of involved end-to-end deep transfer-learning methods.

PaperPDFCode

Code

twanvl/adrem officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Domain AdaptationTransfer Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Logistic Regression

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections