Burn After Reading: Online Adaptation for Cross-domain Streaming Data

In the context of online privacy, many methods propose complex privacy and security preserving measures to protect sensitive data. In this paper we argue that: not storing any sensitive data is the best form of security. Thus we propose an online framework that “burns after reading”, i.e. each online sample is immediately deleted after it is processed. Meanwhile, we tackle the inevitable distribution shift between the labeled public data and unlabeled private data as a problem of unsupervised domain adaptation. Specifically, we propose a novel algorithm that aims at the most fundamental challenge of the online adaptation setting–the lack of diverse source-target data pairs. Therefore, we design a Cross-Domain Bootstrapping approach, called CRODOBO, to increase the combined diversity across domains. Further, to fully exploit the valuable discrepancies among the diverse combinations, we employ the training strategy of multiple learners with cosupervision. CRODOBO achieves state-of-the-art online performance on four domain adaptation benchmarks.