Information Bottleneck Domain Adaptation with Privileged Information for Visual Recognition

We address the unsupervised domain adaptation problem for visual recognition when an auxiliary data view is available during training. This is important because it allows improving the training of visual classifiers on a new target visual domain when paired additional source data is cheaply available. This is the case when we learn from a source of RGB plus depth data, for then test on a new RGB domain. The problem is challenging because of the intrinsic asymmetry caused by the missing auxiliary view during testing and from which discriminative information should be carried over to the new domain. We jointly account for the auxiliary view during training and for the domain shift by extending the information bottleneck method, and by combining it with risk minimization. In this way, we establish an information theoretic principle for learning any type of visual classifier under this particular settings. We use this principle to design a multi-class large-margin classifier with an efficient optimization in the primal space. We extensively compare our method with the state-of-the-art on several datasets, by effectively learning from RGB plus depth data to recognize objects and gender from a new RGB domain.