Unsupervised multi-task domain adaptation

With abundant labeled data, deep convolutional neural networks have shown great success in various image recognition tasks. However, these models are often less powerful when applied to novel datasets due to a phenomenon known as domain shift. Unsupervised domain adaptation methods aim to address this problem, allowing deep models trained on the labeled source domain to be used on a different target domain (without labels). In this paper, we investigate whether the generalization ability of an unsupervised domain adaptation method can be improved through multi-task learning, with learned features required to be both domain invariant and discriminative for multiple different but relevant tasks. Experiments evaluating two fundamental recognition tasks-image recognition and segmentation-show that the generalization ability empowered by multi-task learning may not benefit recognition when the model is directly applied on the target domain, but the multi-task learning setting can boost the performance of state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation methods by a non-negligible margin.