mDALU: Multi-Source Domain Adaptation and Label Unification with Partial Datasets

Object recognition advances very rapidly these days. One challenge is to generalize existing methods to new domains, to more classes and/or to new data modalities. In order to avoid annotating one dataset for each of these new cases, one needs to combine and reuse existing datasets that may belong to different domains, have partial annotations, and/or have different data modalities. This paper treats this task as a multi-source domain adaptation and label unification (mDALU) problem and proposes a novel method for it. Our method consists of a partially-supervised adaptation stage and a fully-supervised adaptation stage. In the former, partial knowledge is transferred from multiple source domains to the target domain and fused therein. Negative transfer between unmatched label space is mitigated via three new modules: domain attention, uncertainty maximization and attention-guided adversarial alignment. In the latter, knowledge is transferred in the unified label space after a label completion process with pseudo-labels. We verify the method on three different tasks, image classification, 2D semantic image segmentation, and joint 2D-3D semantic segmentation. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms all competing methods significantly.