Trust your Good Friends: Source-free Domain Adaptation by Reciprocal
  Neighborhood Clustering
Shiqi Yang Yaxing Wang Joost van de Weijer Luis Herranz Shangling Jui Jian Yang
Domain adaptation (DA) aims to alleviate the domain shift between source
domain and target domain. Most DA methods require access to the source data,
but often that is not possible (e.g. due to data privacy or intellectual
property). In this paper, we address the challenging source-free domain
adaptation (SFDA) problem, where the source pretrained model is adapted to the
target domain in the absence of source data. Our method is based on the
observation that target data, which might not align with the source domain
classifier, still forms clear clusters. We capture this intrinsic structure by
defining local affinity of the target data, and encourage label consistency
among data with high local affinity. We observe that higher affinity should be
assigned to reciprocal neighbors. To aggregate information with more context,
we consider expanded neighborhoods with small affinity values. Furthermore, we
consider the density around each target sample, which can alleviate the
negative impact of potential outliers. In the experimental results we verify
that the inherent structure of the target features is an important source of
information for domain adaptation. We demonstrate that this local structure can
be efficiently captured by considering the local neighbors, the reciprocal
neighbors, and the expanded neighborhood. Finally, we achieve state-of-the-art
performance on several 2D image and 3D point cloud recognition datasets.