Open Set Domain Adaptation by Extreme Value Theory

Common domain adaptation techniques assume that the source domain and the target domain share an identical label space, which is problematic since when target samples are unlabeled we have no knowledge on whether the two domains share the same label space. When this is not the case, the existing methods fail to perform well because the additional unknown classes are also matched with the source domain during adaptation. In this paper, we tackle the open set domain adaptation problem under the assumption that the source and the target label spaces only partially overlap, and the task becomes when the unknown classes exist, how to detect the target unknown classes and avoid aligning them with the source domain. We propose to model the tail of the entropy distribution with Extreme Value Theory for unknown class detection, which has shown promising performance on conventional domain adaptation datasets, and the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models in domain adaptation.