Domain Adaptation

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16 papers in the last 28 days · 0.3% of indexed attention

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Period ending 2026-09-21

5 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Domain Adaptation.

Period ending 2026-09-14

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Domain Adaptation.

Period ending 2026-09-07

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Domain Adaptation.

202 papers

Latest in Domain Adaptation

Sep 22, 2026cs.LG

Graph Domain Adaptation Does Not End with Representation Learning

Graph domain adaptation (GDA) transfers knowledge from a labeled source graph to an unlabeled target graph under shifts in both node attributes and graph structure. Existing methods primarily adapt graph representations through propagation redesign, distribution alignment, or source-to-target transition modeling, but still rely on a single graph-propagating path for target prediction. This leaves open whether an adapted graph representation exhausts the predictive evidence available in the target domain, since the graph-aware expert and graph-free local expert may exhibit different failure modes under topological shifts. To address this limitation, we propose EviGDA, an Evidence-Augmented Graph Domain Adaptation framework that complements graph representation adaptation with a graph-free local expert. The graph-aware expert performs message passing and entropy-aware marginal alignment, while the graph-free local expert learns solely from source node features and labels without graph propagation or target alignment. The two experts are optimized independently and combined only at inference through a task-level constant probability mixture, preserving complementary evidence without joint training, learned routing, or target pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on ten datasets and 16 transfer tasks show that EviGDA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Ziqian Liu, Yongxue Xu, Enze Zhang +3
Sep 17, 2026cs.CV

Ischemic Stroke Segmentation and Net Water Uptake Quantification on Multicenter Non-Contrast CT Using Supervised Target-Domain Adaptation

Objectives: Quantitative assessment of infarct hypodensity on non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT), including net water uptake (NWU), requires manual or semi-manual lesion delineation, often guided by CT perfusion or diffusion-weighted MRI, limiting clinical applicability. Automated segmentation on NCCT could enable efficient biomarker extraction such as NWU but remains challenging across heterogeneous multicenter data. This study aimed to develop and externally test a domain-aware deep learning framework for ischemic stroke segmentation on NCCT and assess its suitability for NWU quantification. Materials & Methods: In this retrospective multicenter study of 801 patients from four datasets, an nnU-Net-based model was trained on NCCT scans from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and the Acute Ischemic Stroke Dataset. To adapt to new domains, the model was fine-tuned on target-domain subsets from Boston (n=11) and ISLES (n=75), with evaluation on held-out cases not used for fine-tuning. Automated segmentations and NWU values were compared with expert references. Results: For lesions \geq 30 mL, median Dice was 0.68 (Boston) and 0.56 (ISLES). Including smaller lesions, which predominated in ISLES, median Dice was 0.54 (interquartile range [IQR] 0.30-0.70) for acute lesion segmentation (Boston dataset) and 0.20 (IQR 0.03-0.41) for NCCT lesion segmentations when compared to post-treatment infarct (primary target of the ISLES challenge). Automated NWU mean absolute error was 1.37 percentage points (SD 1.61, Boston). Conclusion: Target-domain adaptation supported NCCT-only infarct segmentation across heterogeneous external cohorts, although performance varied across domains. The approach enabled low-error NWU quantification from baseline NCCT without advanced imaging, supporting further prospective clinical evaluation.
Linus Britt, Maximilian Nielsen, Susan Klapproth +5
Sep 16, 2026cs.CL

LocQE: Principled Domain Adaptation for Localisation Quality Estimation by Leveraging Post-Edits

Learned quality estimation (QE) models such as COMETKiwi are widespread and work well for general machine translation evaluation. However, they are known to struggle on unseen domains, limiting their performance in a real-world localisation context. We show that they are insensitive to some important factors in localisation, such as whether numbers are translated accurately, or even whether the correct number of spaces and punctuation are preserved in a translation. Further, a key capability for optimisation of machine translation is the ability of QE models to accurately rank different translations of a single segment, which suffers significantly from the domain transfer. In the absence of large-scale direct assessment data, we propose principled fine-tuning approaches to reduce the domain gap with even small amounts of post-editing data. Using a multi-task fine-tuning approach and a simple tokeniser intervention, we create a QE model which proves markedly better at distinguishing preferred post-edits from rejected initial translations in a localisation context. We show that preferences and artificial continuous scores stabilise each other, and argue that to calibrate metrics both in terms of their absolute scores and comparisons between translation of the same source, both types of signal are needed.
Kathy Hämmerl, Gabriel Bretschner, Joern Wuebker
Sep 15, 2026cs.CV

Beyond In-Distribution Metrics: A Systematic Out-of-Distribution Evaluation of Congenital Heart Disease Segmentation

Congenital heart disease (CHD) diagnosis and surgical planning often require patient-specific 3D anatomical models, but manual segmentation is labor-intensive, particularly in complex anatomies. Although deep-learning methods can automate this process, they are typically evaluated in-distribution, despite clinically relevant shifts in scanner, protocol, institution, population, and imaging modality. We present, to our knowledge, the first systematic evaluation of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in CHD segmentation, using ImageCHD as a held-out target cohort. We compare representative segmentation architectures under combined CT and CMR training, CT-only training, self-supervised pretraining, and limited target-domain adaptation. In-distribution performance proves to be a poor indicator of cross-cohort robustness: nnU-Net achieves the highest validation Dice (0.77) but falls to 0.51 on ImageCHD, while SwinUNETR generalizes substantially better, reaching 0.67 Dice. MAE and JEPA pretraining provide only modest additional benefit, suggesting that architecture contributes more to robustness than the tested pretraining strategies in this setting. When limited target-domain supervision is introduced, all SwinUNETR variants exceed 0.76 Dice with only 11 labeled ImageCHD cases. These findings demonstrate that conventional in-distribution evaluation can obscure clinically important generalization failures and support explicit cross-dataset testing as a key component of CHD segmentation evaluation.
Aniketh Vijesh, Shrisharanyan Vasu, Abhijit Ramesh +5
Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

Merging the Knowledge of LLMs for Automatic Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, trained on paired speech-text data, have been improved by leveraging language models (LMs) trained on text-only data. LM fusion methods such as shallow fusion and density ratio are well-established methods that incorporate external LMs during ASR decoding. However, they incur additional computational costs due to LM inference, which is particularly problematic for recent larger LMs. In this study, we propose incorporating external LMs via model merging. This method integrates the LMs directly into the parameters of an LLM-based ASR model, requiring no additional computational cost at inference. We formulate domain extension and transfer via arithmetic operations on LoRA parameters. Experimental evaluations were conducted for the domain adaptation of LLM-based ASR trained on CSJ and LibriSpeech. We show that our LM merging consistently improved the ASR performance in the target domains, without degrading inference speed or memory footprint.
Hayato Futami, Tatsuya Kawahara
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Transfer Learning for Evolving Domains

Transfer learning explores how to leverage knowledge from various tasks or domains (sources) to enhance predictive performance in related tasks or domains (targets). Typically, transfer learning research is segmented into several isolated sub-areas (such as domain generalisation, domain adaptation, or multi-domain learning), each making distinct assumptions about target data availability, namely how much data and how many labels are available at training time. However, in many real-world applications, data availability is not fixed but evolves over time, as instances and labels are progressively collected from a new domain. Each of the classical settings then describes only a snapshot of a trajectory that a deployed system must traverse in full. We formalise this trajectory as a transfer learning problem in its own right, Transfer Learning for Evolving Domains (TrED), specified by a data availability process fixed by the environment, a learning protocol that the method is free to choose, and an evaluation criterion that scores the whole trajectory of models rather than a single one. Within this formalism, the classical settings are recovered as regimes that a learner may pass through, rather than as separate problems that TrED concatenates. We then examine the transfer learning literature to identify mechanisms that are promising building blocks for a solution, and find that most methods are tailored to a single regime and that even the strongest existing candidates do not yet optimise the whole trajectory. We argue that TrED is a well-posed and unsolved problem, and an important direction for future research.
Ricardo Ribeiro Pereira, Jacopo Bono, Hugo Ferreira +4
Sep 13, 2026stat.ML

From matrix inversion to constraints: provably tighter confidence regions for importance weights in label shift

Importance weights are essential in domain adaptation under label shift, yet their utility is often undermined by the finite sample uncertainty associated with their estimation. Existing methods typically analyze this uncertainty through Gaussian elimination on interval-valued linear systems, which leads to overly conservative confidence regions and inefficient downstream applications. We propose a paradigm shift from inversion-based inference to a direct matrix constraint framework. We use this framework to define a joint confidence region and extract marginal intervals via linear programming, deriving provably tighter bounds for importance weights while maintaining exact finite-sample validity. Furthermore, we analyze the confidence region's geometry and provide the theoretical results for its diameter bounds. Evaluated across text, image, multimodal benchmarks, including AGNews, MNIST, CIFAR-10, N24News, and a real-world autonomous driving dataset, nuImages, our approach consistently yields shorter confidence intervals and smaller prediction sets than inversion-based methods.
Mushan Li, Kihyun Han, Yanyuan Ma
Sep 11, 2026cs.CL

NCP-ArchPreview Technical Report: Moving towards Latent Space Language Models through Next Concept Prediction

We introduce NCP-ArchPreview, a latent-space language model that pushes autoregressive pretraining beyond standard next-token prediction (NTP). Alongside NTP, the model learns through Next Concept Prediction (NCP) to predict discrete concepts that span multiple tokens, introducing an explicit and more challenging concept-level objective while preserving standard token-level autoregressive generation. NCP-ArchPreview builds a latent space by constructing a product-quantized concept vocabulary directly from its hidden states, and subsequently learns to predict future concepts via a dedicated Concept Module. These predicted concepts are then fed back to the token level to guide subsequent generation, with NTP and NCP trained jointly end-to-end. We scale this architecture to 8.9B parameters and train it on 5.73T tokens from the Dolma-3 dataset, marking the largest demonstration of a latent-space language model to date. Remarkably, by consuming only 51.3% of the total training tokens, NCP-ArchPreview achieves the final pretraining loss of OLMo-3-7B. Following full pretraining, it outperforms OLMo-3-7B by 2.45 points on the downstream macro-average, including a notable 5.99-point gain on GSM8K. Controlled experiments isolate a clear progression of performance gains stemming from both the latent architecture and the NCP objective. Furthermore, utilizing only 85% of the standard computation, NCP-ArchPreview approaches the training loss of a strictly parameter-aligned 8.9B baseline. The learned latent space remains highly valuable after the pretraining stage: updating just the 17M-parameter VQ module yields a novel, lightweight interface for domain adaptation, while a simple injection of concept representations into a DFlash2 drafter improves the mean accepted length by 4.17% with negligible overhead.
NCP Team, Jiaqi Cao, Chiyu Chen +25
Sep 9, 2026cs.CV

BrainTaskonomy: Learning How to Pretrain and What to Transfer in fMRI Foundation Models

fMRI foundation models increasingly aggregate heterogeneous data across brain states, cohorts, and acquisition settings, yet pretraining domains are commonly treated as a flat mixture and downstream tasks are adapted independently. We study whether measured learning relations can organize both stages without modifying the backbone. During pretraining, a lightweight Brain-DiT proxy estimates difficulty and directed facilitation across ten fMRI domains, yielding a priority-guided cumulative domain curriculum combined with high-to-low-noise timestep scheduling and joint consolidation. During adaptation, controlled first- and higher-order transfer across fifteen tasks constructs a directed taskonomy, from which budgeted integer programming (BIP) selects directly supervised source tasks and target-specific routes. The joint priority-domain and high-to-low-timestep curriculum reduces v-NMSE, PSD-NMSE, and FC-MSE by 6.5%, 16.3%, and 10.5%, respectively, relative to uniform sampling over both dimensions, and shows strong downstream performance across six in- and out-of-domain tasks. The taskonomy reveals asymmetric, target-dependent transfer, while exploratory sealed-test evaluation shows larger descriptive gains for BIP policies when higher-order route spaces are available than for matched random controls. Together, these findings support organizing fMRI pretraining and adaptation by measured learning relations rather than treating domains and tasks as independent flat sets.
Junfeng Xia, Wenhao Ye, Junxiang Zhang +3
Sep 9, 2026eess.AS

AVSRBench: A Multi-Condition AVSR Benchmark

While AVSR has achieved sub-1% word error rates on the standard LRS3 benchmark, its reliance on broadcast speech obscures whether this reflects true generalization or just domain adaptation. To investigate this gap, we evaluate three AVSR architectures across six conditions: controlled broadcast speech, fixed-grammar utterances, hyper-articulated Lombard speech, read speech from professional lipspeakers and non-professional speakers, and spontaneous multi-party video conversations. We find that visual-only performance deteriorates rapidly beyond broadcast domains, and audio-video fusion mainly benefits Lombard speech environments. Visual understanding degrades sharply at 90° profile views, with multimodal systems relying largely on acoustic fallback. Additionally, speaker articulation proves more critical than minor camera shifts, and LLM-based architectures suffer from poor out-of-domain generalization. Our work highlights a significant generalization gap in current AVSR research. To address this, we also introduce RoomReader-AV as a new benchmark for AVSR and release a unified data preprocessing pipeline to make comprehensive multi-condition evaluation accessible.
Rishabh Jain, Naomi Harte
Sep 8, 2026cs.CV

Data-Efficient Crosswalk Segmentation from Overhead CCTV via Confidence- and Geometry-Guided Pseudo-Labeling

Pixel-level annotation of fixed traffic-camera imagery is expensive, while crosswalk models trained from street-level imagery face a substantial viewpoint and appearance shift when applied to elevated CCTV. We investigate a data-efficient target-domain pipeline using 241 manually annotated CCTV images and 5,926 unlabeled CCTV frames. A source-domain experiment trains a 31.0M-parameter custom U-Net on 3,300 first-person-view (FPV) images and obtains 93.05% IoU on its 330-image FPV test split. This result is a source baseline, not transferred performance: the released CCTV notebook instantiates a 42.0M-parameter DeepLabV3-ResNet50 from torchvision weights, and no compatible mapping from the U-Net checkpoint is implemented. Training on 201 manual CCTV images and selecting on 40 held-out manual masks yields 88.91% IoU. The model then predicts all unlabeled frames; image-level certainty and a largest-component area prior rank the candidates, and the top 1,000 attain mean certainty 0.976 and mean combined score 0.988. A repository audit shows that the reported second-stage 98.52% IoU was measured on a 150-image split containing only teacher-generated pseudo-masks. Because of a directory-layout mismatch, the executed combined-data loader found zero manual samples and split 1,000 pseudo-labeled samples into 850 training and 150 evaluation samples. We therefore report 98.52% as internal pseudo-label agreement rather than human-ground-truth accuracy. The defensible target-domain result is 88.91% IoU on the 40 manual validation images. Batch-one FP32 inference at 512 x 512 requires 12.98 ms, corresponding to 77.03 FPS, on an NVIDIA RTX A6000 48 GB GPU. These findings support the practicality of confidence-and-geometry filtering while also showing why pseudo-label evaluation must remain isolated from the labels used for self-training.
Abdirashid Omar, Jonghyuk Park
Sep 8, 2026hep-ph

Inclusive electron-nucleus cross section models from domain adaptation

We apply transfer learning (TL) to construct data-driven models of inclusive electron-nucleus cross sections. Starting from an ensemble of deep neural networks pretrained on 12^{12}C data, we fine-tune the models separately for 3^{3}He, 6^{6}Li, 16^{16}O, 27^{27}Al, 40^{40}Ca, and 56^{56}Fe. The resulting models improve for all targets, marginally so for oxygen, where the carbon baseline is already adequate, although their predictive robustness depends on the amount, coverage, and precision of the available target data. We systematically study how model performance depends on the number of fine-tuned layers, on the fraction and selection of the training data, and on the overlap between the source and target kinematic domains. The layer-wise analysis shows that oxygen requires only shallow adaptation, whereas helium, calcium, and iron require substantially deeper fine-tuning. Lithium represents the least robust case because of its limited dataset, while aluminum demonstrates a strong sensitivity to a small subset of highly constraining measurements. For selected kinematic configurations outside the coverage of the carbon training data, the adapted models remain consistent with the measurements within their estimated uncertainties. Finally, we compare the resulting predictions with those of the phenomenological F1F2 model.
Krzysztof M. Graczyk, Beata E. Kowal, Rwik Dharmapal Banerjee +3
Sep 7, 2026cs.CV

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Symbol Spotting in Historical Encrypted Manuscripts

The decipherment of historical encrypted manuscripts poses a fundamental challenge in Digital Humanities: before any transcription can begin, the symbol inventory of the underlying cipher alphabet must first be identified and characterized. We address this challenge through symbol spotting: given a candidate alphabet specified as a set of rendered font glyphs, the task is to determine whether and where its characters appear in an unseen handwritten document, without any labeled examples from the target script. The main difficulty lies in the domain gap between clean, digitally rendered font queries and degraded handwritten manuscript symbols. We propose a three-stage pipeline that bridges this gap without manual annotation, combining a joint SimCLR+DANN encoder for domain-invariant glyph representations with an embedding-space style-adaptation mechanism applied at retrieval time, requiring no re-training. Experiments on fourteen pages from seven encrypted manuscript collections show that our method outperforms zero-shot foundation models, including CLIP and DINOv2, by a large margin (+0.194+0.194 P@1 over CLIP ViT-L/14), and surpasses task-specific trained baselines by +0.138+0.138 P@1. We further demonstrate that the Raw-Cover metric, computed in a fully unsupervised setting, provides a meaningful script-family fingerprint that identifies the underlying alphabet of an unknown document. This capability is of direct practical relevance to palaeographers, historians, and other researchers working with undeciphered manuscripts.
Giuseppe De Gregorio, Alicia Fornés, Lei Kang +1
Sep 1, 2026cs.CV

Vision-Language-Guided Pseudo-Labels for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation for Waste Sorting

Obtaining labeled data for semantic segmentation in applied settings (e.g., autonomous driving, industrial waste sorting) is expensive and often infeasible at scale. We present a cross-modal pseudo-labeling pipeline that enables unsupervised domain adaptation without any target-domain annotations. The pipeline is built on two core foundation models: SAM generates class-agnostic region proposals, and EVA-CLIP assigns semantic labels based on region-text similarity, with confidence filtering ensuring that only reliable pseudo-labels are used for self-training a segmentation model. As an optional extension, BLIP provides language-grounded verification for ambiguous regions, thereby improving pseudo-label quality without altering the overall pipeline. Evaluated on two domain shifts, synthetic-to-real autonomous driving and, with a primary focus, lab-to-factory industrial waste sorting, the pipeline consistently improves over source-only baselines. Our results demonstrate that pseudo-label quality, not quantity, is a decisive factor in self-training under domain shift, and that cross-modal language grounding offers a practical path to reliable automatic annotation in deployment-critical applications.
Udo Schlegel, Shubhangi, Gabriel Dax +3
Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

CPR for LLMs: Critical-Point Routing against Catastrophic Forgetting in Domain Adaptation

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto standard for adapting large language models (LLMs) to target domains, but it often degrades the model's general capabilities, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. Existing approaches typically modify the SFT loss to mitigate forgetting, but they inevitably operate along a domain-generality trade-off. In this work, we step outside this trade-off by decoupling the two capabilities at the model level: we keep the original base model for general capability, and selectively invoke the SFT expert only when domain-specific knowledge is required. Specifically, we propose CPR (Critical-Point Routing), a token-level routing framework between a base model and its expert derivative, based on critical tokens where the base model fails but the expert succeeds. We train a lightweight hierarchical router that estimates the expert-call probability per token, and pair it with a tailored inference procedure that combines momentum smoothing and threshold gating. Across diverse model-domain configurations, CPR achieves state-of-the-art across all settings, surpassing SFT expert by 1.4-5.5% in domain performance while recovering its general-capability drop from 3.4-14.5% to at most 0.5%, with minimal overhead from invoking the expert on only one-third of tokens.
Kwangmin Ki, Yunhun Nam, Jongheon Jeong +1
Aug 30, 2026cs.CL

DataFoundry: Evolving Data Preparators via Recursive Self-Improvement

Domain adaptation of large language models increasingly depends on constructing high-quality training data, yet existing data-preparation pipelines typically address quality only after generation through post-hoc filtering. This creates a fundamental mismatch: data-quality issues often originate from the construction process itself, while quality control is applied only to its outputs. We introduce \textsc{DataFoundry}, a framework for \textbf{evolving data preparators through recursive self-improvement} before large-scale data production. \textsc{DataFoundry} represents a data preparator as an evolvable runtime specification and instantiates its evolution with a \textsc{Skills-as-Modules} architecture, in which a central \textsc{Controller} orchestrates modular skills to compile executable runtimes, diagnose deficiencies on small pilot sets using domain-appropriate criteria, and translate diagnostic feedback into adapters that revise individual preparation components while preserving stable interfaces. We evaluate \textsc{DataFoundry} on DataPrep-Bench across mathematics, finance, law, and medicine, and find that recursively evolved preparators produce training data with higher downstream utility than baselines. Experiments across different backbones further demonstrate that these improvements are not tied to a particular model, while analyses and case studies further reveal the framework's optimization dynamics and illustrate how its evolution unfolds in practice.
Cehao Yang, Xiaojun Wu, Xueyuan Lin +4
Aug 30, 2026cs.CV

On the Role of MRI Sequences in Cross-Dataset Generalization for Brain Tumor Segmentation

Brain tumor segmentation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a critical task for diagnosis and treatment planning. Despite the success of deep learning architectures such as U-Net and its variants, performance degradation across datasets remains a major challenge, particularly under domain shift and limited annotated data. To address this issue, this study systematically evaluates how individual MRI sequences influence model robustness across two well-known datasets. A ResUNet-based framework is employed, where each modality is trained independently to isolate its effect under a controlled cross-dataset evaluation protocol with tumor size stratification, without target-domain training, or with limited domain adaptation. Results show that the T2f/FLAIR sequence achieves the best cross-dataset performance, with Dice scores exceeding 75%. It consistently outperforms other modalities across most tumor size ranges, while multi-sequence training further improves performance. Additionally, even limited target-domain adaptation yields rapid initial gains, reducing the need for extensive annotations and costly retraining. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/henrique-zan/brain_tumor_segmentation/.
Henrique Zan Grande, João G. Pitol, Lucas B. Schuck +3
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

How Far from Clinical Deployment? Evaluating the Complete Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Pipeline in Medical Imaging

Deploying unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) in clinical practice requires choosing which algorithm to use and which of its trained models to ship. However, the deployment (target) domain is unlabeled, so models cannot be evaluated directly on it, leaving it unclear which to select. We address this by evaluating the complete UDA pipeline, considering both adaptation and label-free selection together. Our study covers eleven clinically relevant cross-domain scenarios from nine medical imaging datasets, with ten UDA algorithms and 13 label-free selection methods (validators), evaluating over 80,000 trained models in total. By this, we find that a capable adapted model usually exists, but identifying it without target labels is difficult: the validator-selected models leave a large and structural target performance gap to the best available one, with no evaluated validator consistently reliable. Towards closing it, we explore two strategies, ensembling and a small target-labeling budget; both narrow this gap but do not close it entirely. Overall, deployable UDA depends on the complete pipeline; addressing the less explored selection step could bring much of current UDA closer to clinical use.
Yiheng Xiong, Luisa Gallée, Daniel Santak Wolf +2
Aug 12, 2026cs.CL

TELLME: Test-Enhanced Learning for Language Model Enrichment

Continual pre-training (CPT) has been widely adopted as a method for domain adaptation in large language models. However, CPT has consistently been accompanied by challenges, such as the difficulty of acquiring large-scale domain-specific datasets and high computational costs. In this study, we propose a novel method called Test-Enhanced Learning for Language Model Enrichment (TELLME) to alleviate these issues. TELLME leverages the TestEnhanced Learning (TEL) principle, whereby the model's training efficiency is improved using quizzes during training. It integrates this principle with CPT, thereby promoting efficient domain-specific knowledge acquisition and long-term memory retention. Experimental results demonstrate that TELLME outperforms existing methods by up to 23.6% in the financial domain and achieves a 9.8% improvement in long-term memory retention.
Minjun Kim, Inho Won, Hyeonseok Lim +6
Aug 10, 2026astro-ph.IM

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Multitask Image Analysis in Realistic Context with Extreme Label Shift; Application to the CTAO first Large Sized Telescope

Unsupervised domain adaptation is a widespread set of methods that leverages the knowledge of a labeled source domain to train a model to perform well on a related unlabeled target domain. They generally introduce an auxiliary adaptation-related task that can be integrated into the multitask paradigm, which aims to merge multiple single-task models into a unified architecture. In this paper, we propose to associate domain adaptation and multitask balancing in the realistic context of an extreme class imbalance. Therefore, we propose a combined framework to cover and validate these approaches, and evaluate its performance in the physics-based context of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO). Along with a comparative study of some relevant adaptation techniques, we highlight the impact of extreme label shift and extend the investigations on importance weighting to rectify it. The complete code and results are published and available as open-source resources on Zenodo.
Michaël Dell'aiera, Thomas Vuillaume, Alexandre Benoit
Aug 10, 2026stat.ML

CPDA: Class-Conditional Path Distribution Alignment for Unsupervised Time-Series Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised time-series domain adaptation (DA) addresses the challenge of transferring a classifier from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain under distribution shifts induced by different users, sensors, devices, acquisition conditions, or temporal dynamics. Existing methods typically mitigate this shift by aligning marginal feature distributions through adversarial training, optimal transport, or moment-based discrepancies. In this paper, we propose Class-Conditional Path Distribution Alignment (CPDA), a non-adversarial discrepancy-based framework that aligns source and target class-conditional latent path distributions rather than only global feature marginals. CPDA introduces a composite signature-spectral kernel that jointly captures pooled semantic features, temporal path structure, frequency-domain information, and low-rank path-signature dynamics, while using source labels and target soft pseudo-labels to perform class-preserving alignment. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that CPDA defines a valid kernel discrepancy, admits existing moment-matching methods as restricted cases, and yields a class-conditional target-risk bound. Extensive experiments with CNN, ResNet18, and TCN backbones on 13 different time-series DA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CPDA against 30 discrepancy, adversarial, and pseudo-labeling baselines.
Felix Ott, Christopher Mutschler
Aug 10, 2026cs.CL

An Agentic Generative Large Language Model for Treatment Planning of Colorectal Cancer

Treatment planning in precision oncology requires synthesizing heterogeneous patient information with rapidly evolving clinical guidelines to ensure guideline-concordant care. While large language models (LLMs) show promise in many diagnostic tasks, their adoption for high-stakes treatment planning is hindered by complex reasoning, adherence to timely clinical guidelines, and safety concerns. In this study, we present GatorOnco, an agentic LLM for colorectal cancer (CRC) treatment planning. GatorOnco is developed using a total of 282 billion tokens of biomedical text, including healthcare system-scale clinical text comprising 166 billion tokens from UF Health. We implemented a domain-adaptation method that integrates pre-training, model merging, a two-stage post-training approach, and agent-based reinforcement learning. An agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach dynamically integrates time-sensitive clinical guidelines into the reasoning process. In a blind, randomized clinical evaluation conducted by five UF Health oncologists, GatorOnco significantly outperformed open-source LLMs (P < 0.01) and achieved expert-level performance comparable to UF Health oncologists. Compared with expert oncologists, GatorOnco received significantly higher ratings for readability (4.46 vs. 4.19, P < 0.01) and completeness (3.91 vs. 3.52, P < 0.01), while showing statistically comparable performance in correctness (4.09 vs. 4.11, P = 0.921), currency (4.04 vs. 3.98, P = 0.478), and safety (4.22 vs. 4.22, P = 0.999). These findings demonstrate that integrating agentic reasoning with large-scale domain adaptation can help bridge the gap for generative AI in high-stakes cancer treatment planning.
Mengxian Lyu, Cheng Peng, Tim Jang +18
Aug 8, 2026cs.CV

EvBS: Event-guided Blur Synthesis for Domain-adaptive Motion Deblurring

Motion deblurring has achieved remarkable progress with deep learning, yet pre-trained deblurring models often suffer from performance degradation in real-world scenarios due to the domain shift between training and testing distributions. To remedy this, we propose EvBS, an event-guided blur synthesis framework that generates diverse training pairs for calibrating pre-trained models to the target domain. While existing methods are constrained by the inherent entanglement between motion and visual content, our method leverages the high temporal resolution of event cameras to effectively decouple them. This enables us to utilize not only the intrinsic motion that is inherent to the given content but also extrinsic motion transferred from different sources within the target domain, thereby facilitating effective adaptation via fine-tuning. Specifically, EvBS comprises two complementary strategies: Intrinsic-Blur Synthesis, which blurs sharp contents with their own motion patterns, and Extrinsic-Blur Synthesis, which transfers motion from blurry patches to distinct sharp content. This approach generates a diverse set of training pairs that break the inherent constraints of naturally coupled motion and content, resulting in enhanced domain-adaptive deblurring performance. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that EvBS effectively enhances the robustness of existing deblurring models on unseen testing datasets.
Junsik Jung, Seokryun Choi, Yoonki Cho +3
Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

JustLLMGRPO: Radiographic Control for Chest X-Ray Generation

Text-conditioned chest X-ray generation aims to synthesize realistic radiographs that faithfully depict specified findings. Existing work has primarily improved quality by updating image generators, implicitly treating prompts as fixed after CXR-domain adaptation. We show that this generator-centric view leaves a substantial optimization dimension underexplored. With a CXR-adapted Sana generator frozen, one-pass reformulation by an unmodified LLM reduces RadDINO-FID from 54.225 to 27.572. Prompt analysis shows that the LLM suppresses temporal comparisons, uncertainty, and other non-renderable report content while emphasizing visible radiographic findings. However, unconstrained reformulation reduces BioViL-T alignment with source prompts from 0.695 to 0.609. We therefore introduce JustLLMGRPO, which applies standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) only to the LLM prompt policy while keeping Sana frozen. Group-relative radiology-aware image feedback retains visual focus while preserving source-prompt alignment. On CheXGenBench, JustLLMGRPO reduces RadDINO-FID to 26.780, a 50.6% improvement over direct prompting, while maintaining alignment (0.696 versus 0.695). It also achieves state-of-the-art distribution coverage and downstream classification utility. These results show that substantial performance can remain latent in how radiographic information is expressed to an adapted generator. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/pxcai/JustLLMGRPO.
Pengxiang Cai, Xiaohan Li, Anglin Liu +3
Aug 6, 2026cs.CV

Topology-Aware Neighborhood Learning for Source-Free Cross-Scene Hyperspectral Image Classification

Domain adaptation has advanced cross-scene hyperspectral image classification, significantly improving discriminative capability in complex scenarios. However, privacy rules or storage limits often block access to data from the source domain. Conventional domain adaptation methods become impractical, severely restricting their utility in realistic remote sensing scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we propose a topology-aware source-free learning framework. We first introduce the entropy momentum pseudo-labeling (EMP) to refine k-means assignments by leveraging entropy-aware confidence and temporal prediction momentum. Under the guidance of the refined pseudo-labels, we further utilize the contextual neighborhood topology (CNT) to exploit the intrinsic geometric structure of the target feature space. Combining the global structural information extracted by collaborative representation with the local similarity information modeled by nearest neighbor search, the CNT accomplishes the comprehensive encoding of manifold-level geometric properties in the target domain feature space. The overall objective integrates cross-entropy on refined pseudo-labels, log inner product-based topology consistency, and an information-maximization term for balanced classification, ensuring stable adaptation in the source-free setting. Extensive experiments on three typical cross-scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method exceeds state-of-the-art performance, and ablation studies further validate the contribution of each module. The results highlight the critical role of topology-aware modeling in achieving robust and accurate classification without source data.
Qingmei Li, Juepeng Zheng, Jiarui Zhang +2
Aug 6, 2026cs.CV

Bayesian adaptively-weighted ensembles for few-shot abdominal segmentation

Few-shot learning has emerged as a promising approach for anatomical segmentation when labelled data are scarce. However, different few-shot learning algorithms exhibit complementary strengths and weaknesses, with performance varying across anatomical targets and institutions. Existing few-shot segmentation ensembles, that combine predictions from multiple algorithms, typically employ fixed weighting schemes and therefore cannot adjust model contributions according to the target domain. In this work, we propose a Bayesian adaptively-weighted ensemble framework for segmentation under label scarcity and domain shift. Multiple few-shot segmentation algorithms are first adapted using a small labelled support set. Bayesian optimisation is then used to automatically identify ensemble weights that maximise segmentation performance on a target-domain validation set. The learned weights are subsequently fixed and applied to combine predictions on previously unseen query images from the target domain. The proposed framework is evaluated on the Cross-institution Male Pelvic Structures dataset using held-out anatomical structures and institutions to simulate simultaneous label scarcity and institutional domain shift. Results demonstrate statistically significant improvements over individual few-shot learners, fixed-weight ensembles, training-from-scratch baselines and recent state-of-the-art ensembling approaches. By adapting model contributions to the target anatomy and institutional domain, the proposed framework provides a practical mechanism for deploying segmentation systems to new clinical sites under severe annotation constraints.
Abbas Al-Sabbagh, Shalom F. Mushtaq, Tomás M. da Silva +7
Aug 5, 2026cs.LG

Rectifying Geometric Misalignment: Online Source-Free Adaptation for Class-Imbalanced EEG

Electroencephalography (EEG) based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) often require unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) to generalize across subjects and sessions. While Riemannian alignment methods like the Riemannian Centering Transformation (RCT) are effective for handling covariate shifts, they implicitly assume balanced class priors. However, in realistic online BCI scenarios, the label distributions vary dynamically (label shift), causing standard alignment techniques to geometrically misalign the target data distributions. In this work, we propose OSPDIM (Online SPD manifold information maximization), a source-free online UDA framework designed to address label shifts on the Riemannian manifold. OSPDIM introduces a manifold-constrained bias parameter into the tangent space mapping, which is optimized via information maximization to correct the geometric skew caused by imbalanced data streams. Unlike offline methods relying on global batch statistics, OSPDIM estimates and corrects geometric bias on-the-fly. Simulations on 2D SPD matrices visually demonstrate that OSPDIM successfully rectifies the misalignment where standard centering fails. Extensive experiments on multiple motor imagery datasets show that OSPDIM significantly outperforms standard Riemannian baselines, particularly in challenging online adaptation scenarios with severe class imbalance, offering a robust solution for practical, plug-and-play BCI systems.
Shiwen Chu, Shanglin Li, Motoaki Kawanabe +1
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

FUSEP: A Multi-Center Benchmark for Diverse Tasks in Early Pregnancy Fetal Ultrasound Screening

A large number of infants with congenital anomalies are born each year globally, especially in areas with underdeveloped medical resources. Currently, fetal ultrasound screening is the most common modality for early pregnancy anatomy detection. This modality can detect anomalies earlier and provide opportune treatment advice. However, the lack of an ultrasound dataset on early fetal gestation has slowed down the development of automated assisted diagnosis. In this work, we present a benchmark dataset for Fetal Ultrasound Screening in Early Pregnancy to facilitate intelligent ultrasound examination and assisted diagnosis called FUSEP. Our dataset consists of two ultrasound views recommended by the international guideline, i.e., Crown-rump Length (CRL) and Nuchal Translucency (NT) views in three hospitals, totaling 4,017 ultrasound images, with 45,820 box-level expert-level annotations. Our dataset and baseline present the following three contributions: 1) Our medical experts annotated a total of 14 key anatomical structures in two views using a box-level format; 2) Our data is collected extensively from different sonographers, devices, scanning angles, hospitals, etc; 3) We report the performance of the semi-supervised learning, fully supervised learning, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), and source-free UDA in ultrasound images multi-object detection. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first publicly available dataset and benchmark for fetal early pregnancy ultrasound screening. We believe that FUSEP and benchmark can contribute to the medical community in the development of multiple tasks such as standard plane recognition, quality control on ultrasound images, automated assisted diagnostics in early fetal pregnancy, medical multi-object detection, domain adaptation for object detection, etc.
Bin Pu, Jiewen Yang, Liwen Wang +9
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

COSMO: Consensus-Driven Shift Modulation for Source-Free Domain Adaptation

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) adapts a source-trained model to an unlabeled target domain without source data, a practical setting under privacy or storage constraints. Yet its self-generated supervision can reinforce source bias under substantial domain shifts. Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) offer complementary semantic knowledge, but the relative reliability of the source model and VLM varies across target samples. Existing cross-model guidance does not explicitly account for this variation and may overwrite valid source-derived evidence under conflict, a failure we term source-derived evidence forgetting. We formulate VLM-guided SFDA as a sample-wise reliability-allocation problem and propose Consensus-Driven Shift Modulation (COSMO). COSMO replaces expert-to-expert guidance with co-adaptation through an anchored shared consensus. It first forms a sample-specific initial consensus that favors the more concentrated prediction. During adaptation, COSMO re-aggregates both branches' evolving evidence and regulates how far the resulting consensus moves from its initial anchor based on consensus uncertainty and training progress. This keeps the shared supervision anchored yet adaptive. Across four benchmarks, COSMO achieves state-of-the-art performance under matched VLM backbones. Further analyses indicate that it better balances the retention of valid source-derived evidence with the absorption of complementary VLM evidence.
Bo Li, Junjie Peng, Xiaohua Xie +1
Aug 4, 2026eess.IV

Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Uterine layer Segmentation: From Labeled Cine to Unlabeled Dynamic EPI MRI

Uterine peristalsis is a key physiological phenomenon responsible for various functions across the menstrual cycle, intimately linked to uterine wall microstructure. Alterations in uterine motion and tissue properties are implicated in the etiology of gynecological diseases, yet these processes have been studied in isolation. We introduce a dynamic multi-echo gradient echo EPI framework for simultaneous characterization and correlation of uterine peristaltic activity and time-resolved T2* changes at 0.55T. Inherent susceptibility artifacts, reduced resolution, and burden of manual uterine layer annotation are addressed by an unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation framework, transferring segmentation knowledge from labeled cine MRI to unlabeled dynamic EPI. We implemented Unet-LSTM with multi-scale domain discriminators that exploits temporal layer dynamics. A Dice score of 0.88 and Jaccard index of 0.80 was achieved. Mean T2* values were 108ms, 76ms, and 124ms for the myometrium, junctional zone, and endometrium. A negative correlation between junctional zone area and T2* was observed in 14/39 cases, providing first insights into oxygenation patterns associated with junctional zone contraction and motion, demonstrating feasibility of assessing the interplay between contractility and dynamic T2* changes.
Smiti Tripathy, Milauni Desai, Jordina Aviles Verdera +1
Aug 3, 2026eess.IV

Mapping melliferous tree species in Kenya via one-class classification with hyperspectral unsupervised domain adaptation

The beekeeping sector holds significant potential for livelihood diversification among the agropastoral communities in Kenya. Melliferous tree species play a critical role by providing essential nectar sources for bees. However, limited knowledge of their precise spatial distributions constrains the full development of beekeeping. One-class classification (OCC) offers a practical solution for detecting single target species without requiring extensive labeled data from other classes. Although existing OCC methods perform well in trained domains, the generalization capability to unseen domains remains limited due to domain shift. To address these challenges, this study proposes a hyperspectral unsupervised domain adaptation OCC framework (HyUDA-One) for tree species mapping using airborne hyperspectral imagery and laser scanning data. The spatial-spectral regularized pseudo-positive learning was designed to mitigate domain shift and improve model generalizability. The effectiveness of HyUDA-One was demonstrated by mapping three key melliferous tree species in two savanna landscapes in southern Kenya. The results show that HyUDA-One significantly improves performance in unlabeled domains. The F1-scores of 0.788, 0.845, and 0.768 were achieved for Senegalia mellifera, Vachellia tortilis, and Commiphora africana in the trained domain, respectively. In the untrained domain, the F1-scores of Senegalia mellifera and Vachellia tortilis were 0.756 and 0.884, respectively. The distribution maps revealed the spatial patterns of these melliferous tree species and the nectar source availability, offering an important reference for sustainable beekeeping development in savanna landscapes. Furthermore, the proposed framework can potentially be extended to other mapping applications, such as invasive species detection.
Zhaozhi Luo, Janne Heiskanen, Ilja Vuorinne +6
Aug 2, 2026cs.CL

Two-Stage Bengali Sentiment Classification: Domain Adaptation Through Continual Learning and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Understanding sentiment in low-resource languages remains a key challenge for Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly when domain-specific data is scarce. In this work, we present SentiBanglaBERT, a two-stage Bengali sentiment classification framework combining domain-adaptive continual pretraining and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The approach enables contextual adaptation to news-style data while remaining computationally efficient through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Beyond performance, SentiBanglaBERT integrates SHAP-based interpretability, offering linguistic insights into how Bengali morphological cues, such as negation suffixes and aspectual markers, influence sentiment predictions. Experiments demonstrate stable performance comparable to strong baselines while providing greater transparency and interpretive depth. This framework highlights the potential of domain-adaptive continual learning as a foundation for interpretable, resource-efficient NLP in morphologically rich, underrepresented languages.
MD Shaikh Rahman, Syed Maudud E Rabbi, Muhammad Mahbubur Rashid
Jul 31, 2026cs.CV

Multi-Source Multi-View Graph Domain Adaptation with Hyperbolic Residual Encoding for Cross-Site MDD Identification from rs-fMRI

Cross-site identification of major depressive disorder (MDD) from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is hindered by inter-site distribution shifts and heterogeneous functional connectivity (FC) views. These views capture complementary neural relationships but exhibit distinct site biases and graph topologies, complicating alignment without sacrificing disease-relevant information or cross-view consistency. Existing studies largely treat multi-view connectome learning and cross-site adaptation separately. To the best of our knowledge, few studies have jointly modeled multiple FC views under multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation for cross-site rs-fMRI-based MDD classification. We construct Pearson correlation, sparse representation, and Granger causality graphs, each encoded by a view-specific graph attention network. Dual-stream adaptive fusion explicitly integrates pairwise cross-view interactions, followed by lightweight hyperbolic residual encoding for curvature-aware representation refinement. Class-wise Cauchy--Schwarz alignment reduces inter-source and source-target discrepancies, complemented by adversarial learning, information maximization, and confidence-aware pseudo-labeling. Across seven unlabeled target domains, our framework achieves 73.60% mean accuracy and 71.90% AUC, demonstrating effective generalization under heterogeneous acquisition conditions. These results highlight the effectiveness of unified heterogeneous-view modeling, curvature-aware refinement, and multi-source domain adaptation for cross-site MDD identification.The source code is at https://github.com/OPUS-Lightphenexx/MM-HyperGDA
Zhanpeng Zheng, Xiran Chen, Haiteng Jiang +6
Jul 31, 2026cs.LG

Cross-Resolution Semantic Learning for Graph Domain Adaptation

Graph Domain Adaptation (GDA) transfers predictive knowledge from labeled source graphs to unlabeled target graphs under distribution shift. Existing methods align representations or regularize graph structures, but do not explicitly model how class-discriminative knowledge learned at different source neighborhood ranges should be routed across target ranges. We call the neighborhood range encoded by a graph representation its propagation resolution and define semantic resolution shift as a cross-domain change in the propagation resolutions at which class-discriminative evidence is strongest. Such shifts can make fixed same-resolution pairing suboptimal and increase the risk of negative transfer. To address this issue, we propose Cross-Resolution Semantic Learning (CReSL), a GDA method that learns soft sourceto-target resolution correspondence from cross-domain class structure. First, CReSL constructs a multi-resolution representation bank using a shared Graph Neural Network and learnable resolution embeddings, with a resolution-indexed expert for each source resolution. Second, CReSL introduces Cross-Resolution Prototype Transport, which constructs class-resolution prototypes from source labels and soft target posteriors and converts cross-domain prototype discrepancies into expert-specific routing over target resolutions. Third, CReSL introduces Cross-Resolution Target Grafting, which constructs posterior-weighted target-to-source prototype displacements and enforces correspondence-weighted prediction consistency for instance-level adaptation under class uncertainty. Extensive experiments on graph benchmarks under diverse domain shifts show that CReSL outperforms strong representative baselines across most settings.
Yingxu Wang, Haoze Huang, Zhongkai Zheng +1
Jul 31, 2026cs.CV

Training-Free Entity-Level Few-Shot Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images with Advection Refinement

Existing cross-domain few-shot segmentation approaches suffer from high training costs due to source-domain episodic training and pixel-wise dense prediction, while often producing fragmented and noisy predictions. To overcome these issues, we propose a training-free entity-level few-shot segmentation framework for remote sensing images with advection refinement. Specifically, we first leverage SAM3's generic geometric priors to generate category-agnostic entity primitives. By reformulating few-shot inference from pixel-level prediction to entity-level reasoning, foreground and background prototypes are constructed and combined with dense textual semantic responses from SAM3 to build a multi-modal semantic potential field. Furthermore, an advection equation-based semantic refinement mechanism is introduced to propagate category-aware information across both feature and similarity spaces, enhancing semantic continuity and suppressing local texture noise. Extensive experiments on multiple remote sensing datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively mitigates domain shift and local noise, substantially improving SAM3's adaptation capability for remote sensing few-shot segmentation without additional training. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/yu-ni1989/ELFSS-AR.
Xueting Bai, Huan Ni
Jul 31, 2026cs.CV

Domain-Division based Progressive Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation

With growing privacy and portability concerns, source-free domain adaptation requires only a source pre-trained model and an unlabeled target domain, allowing for effective adaptation to the target data. Most existing self-training methods focus on selecting and exploiting samples with reliable predictions, often neglecting others. Inspired by the finding that deep models learn clean samples faster than noisy ones, we propose a domain-division based progressive learning method named DPL. Specifically, our approach consists of two alternating stages, each beginning with the division of the target domain into easy-to-adapt and hard-to-adapt subdomains based on adaptation difficulty, followed by neighborhood-based pseudo label assignment. In stage one, we enhance classification accuracy through uncertainty-aware self-training and alignment of corresponding classes between subdomains. Stage two then applies tailored learning strategies to each subdomain, starting with consistency learning on the easy-to-adapt samples and progressing to utilizing local structural information for the more challenging ones, thereby mining the intrinsic properties of the target data. Extensive experiments on several widely used benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/iamjingli/DPL.
Pan Liu, Jing Li, Meng Zhao +3
Jul 31, 2026cs.IT

Domain-Adaptive Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding for Image Classification

Deep joint source--channel coding (Deep JSCC) enables visual semantic transmission by mapping inputs directly to channel symbols and task outputs, but its performance can deteriorate under distribution shifts between training and deployment domains. We study single-source domain adaptation for task-oriented Deep JSCC and formulate a classification-capacity-invariance (CCI) function to characterize how the available channel capacity and class-conditional cross-domain invariance affect target domain classification accuracy. A scalar linear analysis of source-domain-optimal solutions and a controlled shallow nonlinear validation show that target domain classification accuracy can vary non-monotonically with the invariance constraint and with available capacity along separate control paths obtained by varying the transmitted dimension or CSNR. We then propose a domain-adaptive Deep JSCC framework that combines pseudo-label-based class-level adversarial alignment with supervised contrastive learning on confidence-filtered target samples. Experiments on digit and PACS datasets over AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels demonstrate improved target domain generalization without introducing additional inference-time networks. On SVHN \rightarrow MNIST, the proposed method achieves 98.15% target-domain accuracy at a CSNR of 10 dB.
Yishen Li, Xuechen Chen, Xiaoheng Deng +1
Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

Towards Practical Algorithm Selection for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Medical Imaging

Numerous unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) algori-thms exist, but for clinical practice, selecting the best-suited one along with proper hyperparameters often remains unclear, as the unlabeled deployment (target) domain prevents direct evaluation. We propose a label-free criterion that jointly selects the algorithm and hyperparameters for UDA. Given a pool of candidate models from multiple algorithms trained with different hyperparameters, our approach scores each candidate against an agreement reference, and selects the one with the highest score. The agreement reference is constructed in two levels without using target labels. First, we leverage multiple label-free selection signals, using each to nominate a model within every algorithm. Second, the nominated models are aggregated across algorithms to form a reference prediction for each unlabeled target sample. The candidate whose predictions agree most with this reference is then selected for deployment. Experimental results on four brain MRI and four chest X-ray datasets across seven clinically relevant transfer scenarios show that our method achieves better selection performance than other methods and remains effective across different algorithm pools. Our approach takes a step towards practical, label-free algorithm selection for clinical deployment of UDA.
Yiheng Xiong, Luisa Gallée, Daniel Santak Wolf +2
Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

Benchmarking Foundation and Large Language Models for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

Few-shot medical image segmentation (FS-MIS) aims to segment novel regions of interest (ROIs) from a few annotated support examples. Despite rapid progress, existing FS-MIS solutions span diverse paradigms but are evaluated under inconsistent settings, leaving their relative effectiveness unclear. We introduce FAME, a unified benchmark for evaluating FS-MIS solutions, covering specialists, SAM-based methods, CLIP-based methods, and MLLM-based methods. FAME contains 14,958 test samples across 7 anatomical sites, 9 imaging modalities, and 14 ROI categories, and evaluates models under zero-shot and ten-shot settings with additional assessment of target-absence recognition and generalization under covariate and semantic shifts. Our evaluation reveals several findings. First, effective few-shot segmentation depends on how models exploit support examples: direct visual adaptation generally outperforms prompt-based strategies. Second, increasing support examples improves performance only when models can effectively utilize them. Third, semantic transfer remains substantially more challenging than imaging-domain adaptation, and strong localization ability does not necessarily imply reliable target-absence recognition. We hope FAME provides a comprehensive understanding of current FS-MIS solutions and facilitates the development of more effective and reliable few-shot medical segmentation methods.
Jinghong Liu, Yuchuan Deng, Fanping Liu +2
Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

A Lightweight Foundation Model for Collider Physics with Multi-Domain Adaptation

We present a lightweight approach to foundation modeling (\textbf{NEXUS}) that leverages pre-trained learning from collider physics data towards out-of-domain tasks in other scientific datasets, using a fully connected autoencoder model with approximately 3 million parameters. The model pre-trains with no supervision over a large-scale collision dataset from the Large Hadron Collider modeled by charged particle track features. Downstream tasks for collider analyses, such as kinematic regression and event classification, are developed on pre-trained model weights and achieve improved accuracy with only small labeled datasets when compared to equivalent architectures trained from scratch. The benefits of pre-training are additionally investigated through latent space interpretation and application to other domains, including gravitational waves, flood forecasting, and neural activity. Furthermore, the relative computational simplicity of NEXUS is demonstrated compared to transformer approaches at comparable scale, opening the door to power-efficient inference and real-time or edge applications of foundation models in scientific experiments.
Liangyu Wu, Qibin Liu, Alexander Yue +1
Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

Domain adaptation for handwriting trajectory reconstruction from IMU sensors

Digital pens are commonly used to write on digital devices, providing the handwriting trace and enhancing human-computer interation. This study focuses on a digital pen equipped with kinematic sensors, allowing users to write on any surface while simultaneously preserving a digital trajectory of handwriting. This technology holds significant potential as a valuable educational tool, particularly in classrooms where it can facilitate the process of learning to write. A major issue is based on the difference in captured signals between adults and children. For similar handwriting trace, we have large differences in sensor signals due to differences in speed and confidence in the handwriting gesture of children. To address this, we investigate a domain adaptation approach to build a unified intermediate feature representation aimed at facilitating the trajectory reconstruction. We demonstrate the interest of domain adaptation methods in leveraging existing knowledge for application in different contexts. Specifically, we compare our domain adaptation approach with two other methods: training the model from scratch and fine-tuning the model.
Florent Imbert, Romain Tavenard, Yann Soullard +1
Jul 29, 2026q-bio.GN

PlantBGC: Transformer for Plant BGC Discovery via Label-Free Domain Adaptation and Weak Supervision

Plant biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) encode specialized-metabolite pathways, yet curated plant BGC labels remain scarce, hindering supervised discovery at genome scale. Existing plant BGC mining tools are largely signature- and rule-driven and do not fully leverage recent advances in contextual representation learning for modeling long-range domain context and controlling false positives under strong domain shift. We seek an AI-assisted workflow that narrows experimental search space by transferring supervision from well-annotated microbial BGCs to plant genomes. We present PlantBGC, representing genomes as ordered Pfam-domain sequences and learning BGC-likeness with an encoder-only Transformer trained on MIBiG microbial BGCs and adapted to plants via label-free masked language modeling. On microbial benchmarks, PlantBGC achieves token-level AUC = 0.988 (10-fold CV) and 0.979 (leave-class-out). On plants, adaptation improves known-BGC recovery on n = 34 curated loci under strict 100% coverage, increasing recovery from 29.4% to 67.6% and indicating more complete boundaries. GO/KEGG-derived weak supervision reduces proxy primary-like ratio by 48.40% (GO) and 45.20% (KEGG), with consistent per-species reductions (paired Wilcoxon p = 1.53e-5). Compared to plantiSMASH, PlantBGC yields more compact loci on matched regions (median length ratio = 0.278; 93.8% of pairs are shorter).
Yuhan Zhao, Nidhi Grover, Zhishan Guo +1
Jul 28, 2026eess.AS

Device Invariance using Domain Adaptation on Acoustic Scene Classification

This paper explores the effectiveness of domain adaptation techniques when using convolutional neural network (CNN)-based and transformer-based feature representations for acoustic scene classification. Two well-known domain adaptation techniques, namely domain adversarial neural network (also called DANN) and conditional domain adversarial network (also called CDAN) are evaluated under various domain shifts. Our study indicates that DANN provides effective domain adaptation fairly consistently for both feature extractors. On the other hand, CDAN provides effective domain adaptation only for CNN-based feature extractors. The study gives insights into how domain adaptation methods may need to be tailored to the underlying feature representation. Experimental evaluation with multiple devices on the DCASE 2020 dataset supports the observations.
Abhishek dileep, Shubham Sharma, Padmanabhan Rajan
Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

A Cyclic Adaptation-Generalization Framework with Uncertainty-Guided Self-Paced Learning for Long-Term Brain-Machine Interfaces

Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs), which link the brain to external devices, hold great potential in rehabilitation, human performance augmentation, and human-centered robotics. However, invasive BMIs face a critical challenge for long-term deployment due to neural drift, which degrades decoding performance over time and necessitates frequent recalibration. Existing methods designed to mitigate neural drift typically rely on either domain adaptation (DA) or domain generalization (DG) alone and often fail to capture fine-grained distribution shifts across neural subdomains, resulting in limited performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose Uncertainty-guided Self-paced Cycling (UnSPC), a robust framework that synergizes DA and DG for target domain refining under an Uncertainty-guided Self-paced Pseudo-labeling (UnSPL) mechanism. To handle subdomain neural drift across domains, UNSPL is proposed to iteratively mine reliable pseudo-labeled samples with a noise-robust ranking strategy for further fine-tuning. Leveraging these high-quality samples, we introduce a novel Cycling Adaptation and Generalization (CycAG) strategy, which integrates DA and DG within an iterative cycle to progressively mitigate both global and subdomain drift. This cyclic process enables effective alignment to evolving target distributions while preserving robust and transferable representations, thereby mitigating performance degradation under long-term neural drifts. Extensive experiments on multiple neural decoding datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of UnSPC. To our knowledge, our proposed UnSPC is the first to cyclically integrate DA and DG with pseudo-labeling, paving the way toward stable long-term BMI controls.
Jiyu Wei, Di Hong, Zhanjie Zhang +3
Jul 23, 2026cs.CL

Trustworthiness Costs of Domain Adaptation in Small Language Models:A Cross-Architecture Empirical Study

Domain adaptation of small language models (SLMs) has emerged as a practical strategy for deploying capable NLP systems in resource-constrained, high-stakes environments including healthcare, legal services, and financial analysis. While performance gains from parameter-efficient fine-tuning are well characterised, the corresponding impact on trustworthiness (factual calibration and adversarial robustness) remains poorly understood. This paper presents the first systematic cross-domain, cross-architecture empirical study quantifying the trustworthiness cost of domain adaptation across three SLM architectures (TinyLlama 1B, Gemma-2 2B, Llama 3.2 1B), three domains (healthcare, legal, finance), two training-data conditions (benign and adversarially perturbed), and four fine-tuning strategies (baseline LoRA, Safety-DPO, Dark Experience Replay, and Task Arithmetic LoRA, TA-LoRA). Trustworthiness is evaluated through TruthfulQA MC2 (factual calibration) and HarmBench ASR (adversarial robustness) across all 216 experimental configurations with three random seeds. Three principal findings emerge. First, baseline QLoRA domain adaptation produces minimal TruthfulQA MC2 change across all model-domain combinations (mean |Delta TQA| < 0.02). Second, adversarially perturbed training data consistently improves domain adaptation quality (Delta loss approximately -0.040) without worsening trustworthiness benchmarks. Third, none of the three safety-preserving strategies reduced adversarial harm susceptibility: Safety-DPO was effectively neutral (mean Delta ASR < 0.001), while Dark ER and TA-LoRA increased mean HarmBench ASR by +0.171 and +0.155 respectively in safety-aligned models (Gemma-2 2B, Llama 3.2 1B), with individual configurations exceeding +0.45. These results challenge the assumption that replay-based and arithmetic-merge strategies transfer alignment to domain-adapted SLMs.
Ramesh B. Paramkusham
Jul 22, 2026cs.LG

Online Variance Reduction for Domain Adaptation on Streaming Data

This paper studies the problem of stochastic variance reduction (SVR) for the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and correlation alignment (CORAL) loss functions. Although various offline SVR algorithms for these losses have been proposed, these are incompatible with online, distributed, or incremental learning settings. This paper presents Adaptive vaRiance Reduction via Online reWeighting (ARROW), the first online SVR algorithm for the MMD and CORAL for streamed data. The method maintains moving average references of the alignment statistics, and adaptively reweights incoming minibatches so that the minibatch and reference statistics are aligned. Further, we propose a relaxed reweighting scheme so that the ensuing weight-optimisation problem is tractable. In experiments and simulations, we show that ARROW performs competitively with offline algorithms in terms of runtime, degree of variance reduction achieved, and target domain accuracy.
Andrea Napoli
Jul 22, 2026cs.LG

Variance-reduced Domain Adaptation using Paired Sampling

Correlation alignment and the maximum mean discrepancy are two widely used distribution-matching frameworks for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). However, high variance in these losses has been shown to undermine their effectiveness in minibatch optimisation settings. Furthermore, the losses lack finite-sum structure, which renders them incompatible with classical stochastic variance reduction (SVR) methods. This paper proposes Paired Sampling for Domain Adaptation (PSDA), a novel SVR technique tailored to such objectives. PSDA pairs observations both within and across domains, to form quadruplets that are always sampled together during training. The pairings are designed to minimise expected gradient variance, and reduce to solving a set of linear assignment problems. Our simulations demonstrate reduced variance compared to related methods, and experiments on three domain shift datasets show improved target domain accuracy.
Andrea Napoli
Jul 22, 2026stat.AP

Domain-Adapted Power Curve for Cross-Farm Applications

The wind energy industry relies on accurate power curve models to make power forecast, evaluate turbine performance, quantify upgrade, or support site-planning decisions. In this paper, we focus on site-planning power curves, i.e., we investigate how power curve models trained using turbine data on an operating wind farm can be transferred to a new, undeveloped farm. The traditional wisdom in the wind energy literature relies on distance, layout, or terrain characteristics for making cross-farm power curve transfer. Through the lens of domain adaptation, we propose a more reliable transfer learning approach for cross-farm power curve modeling. In the cross-farm applications, a domain is specified by the temporal environmental variates and spatial terrain variables. Domain adaptation is to find a capable similarity metric to adapt the domain on the new farm to that on the existing farm. Empirical results show that our domain adapted power curve consistently outperforms competing approaches by an appreciable margin for site-planning power predictions.
Ahmadreza Chokhachian, V. Roshan Joseph, Yu Ding
Jul 21, 2026cs.CV

Continual Video-MLLM Adaptation over Evolving Domains

Video multimodal large language models have shown strong capability in video understanding, yet their adaptation to sequentially evolving domains remains underexplored. In real-world deployments, video data often arrives continuously from heterogeneous domains, requiring the model to acquire new domain-specific knowledge without overwriting previously learned capabilities. Existing continual learning methods typically rely on shared adaptation spaces, which can induce severe cross-domain interference and catastrophic forgetting. We propose Distribution-Aware Expert Routing, a parameter-efficient framework for continual Video-MLLM adaptation over evolving domains. DAER maintains domain-isolated lightweight experts while keeping the pretrained Video-MLLM backbone frozen, thereby decoupling domain-specific adaptation from the general multimodal knowledge of the pretrained model. To enable fine-grained specialization, we introduce an intra-domain distribution-aware routing mechanism that matches each input to expert-level prototype reservoirs using MMD. To address the absence of task identities at inference time, we further propose an inter-domain routing mechanism that performs prototype matching in a discriminative subspace for robust domain identification. In addition, we introduce adaptive domain merging to improve parameter scalability and adopt a two-stage optimization strategy to stabilize expert specialization during continual learning. We evaluate DAER by curating a domain-incremental benchmark built from ten VidQA datasets covering diverse visual environments and reasoning demands. Experiments on two strong Video-MLLM backbones show that DAER consistently outperforms prior methods.
Rui Cheng, Meixing Shi, Yuxiang Cai +3
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

SGN: A Similarity-based Generative Network for Data Generation under Distribution Shift

Generative models trained on a source domain often produce samples that are poorly aligned with shifted target domains, limiting their effectiveness for target-domain data augmentation. Although target-specific adaptation can reduce this mismatch, it typically requires additional optimization and domain-specific parameters. We propose a Similarity-based Generative Network (SGN), a reusable framework that is trained once on labeled source data and applied to new target domains without parameter updates. SGN learns a latent space structured by label-induced pairwise similarities while preserving reconstructive information through an encoder-decoder architecture. At generation time, a small labeled representative set from the target domain is encoded and combined in the learned latent space, allowing the generated samples to inherit target-specific characteristics while maintaining class consistency. We further analyze the realizability and dimensionality requirements of the proposed similarity structure. Experiments on image and tabular datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SGN for target-guided data augmentation under source-to-target distribution shifts.
Jiaqi Zhu, Xincheng Chen, Yuncheng Wu +2
Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Selectivity Matters: Source Node Influence Pruning for Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) aims to facilitate knowledge transfer from a labeled source graph to an unlabeled target graph by mitigating cross-domain distribution shifts. Existing methods primarily focus on node-level feature alignment in latent spaces, relying on the implicit assumption that all source nodes contribute positively to the alignment. However, this assumption often fails because a node's semantic information is intrinsically coupled with its topological graph structure. Due to structural shifts, source nodes with severe structural deviations (e.g., structural outliers) lack semantic counterparts in the target graph, and forcing alignment on them introduces severe noise and causes negative transfer. To bridge this gap, we argue that selective source node utilization is superior to full-graph training, thereby shifting the research paradigm from feature-level alignment to data-level refinement. To this end, we propose Source Node Influence Pruning (SNIP), a novel model-agnostic, data-centric refinement framework. Specifically, SNIP quantifies the structural discrepancy between individual source nodes and the target domain by integrating multiple centrality measures, assigning each source node an influence score. A rank-based normalization mechanism is further employed to eliminate scale variations across different measures, allowing SNIP to effectively identify and filter out structurally incompatible nodes with low influence scores. As a plug-and-play method, SNIP constructs a refined "sub-source" graph that is inherently more beneficial for subsequent alignment. Comprehensive experiments across eight transfer scenarios on five real-world datasets demonstrate that SNIP consistently outperforms competitive baselines and significantly enhances adaptation performance, validating the superiority of selective node utilization over full-graph training.
Ridong Han, Yawen Shen, Zhongnian Li +3
Jul 20, 2026cs.CV

LFM: Leveraging Foundation Models for Source-Free Universal Domain Adaptation

Source-free universal domain adaptation (SF-UniDA) adapts a pre-trained source model to an unlabeled target domain under both covariate and label shifts, without access to source data. However, existing SF-UniDA methods rely on inefficient techniques such as threshold tuning and clustering. Foundation models (FMs), known for their generalization and zero-shot capabilities, remain underexplored in SF-UniDA. In this paper, we propose a framework that leverages foundation models (LFM) for SF-UniDA. We use a vision-language model (VLM) to compute similarities between target samples and text labels, including those for unknown classes generated by prompting a large language model. The label shift type is determined by analyzing the coefficient of variation of a similarity-based sample-level score. Unknown samples are identified using a binary Gaussian mixture model fitted to another similarity-based metric. Under a consensus strategy, the pseudo-labels generated by the VLM are refined by the target model initialized with the pre-trained source model, integrating knowledge from both the source domain and foundation models. Finally, these refined pseudo-labels are used to train the target model. Extensive experiments across all possible label shifts and multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed LFM framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/iamjingli/LFM.
Jing Li, Pan Liu, Meng Zhao +7
Jul 20, 2026cs.CV

DA-MergeLoRA: Hypernetwork-Based LoRA Merging for Few-Shot Test-Time Domain Adaptation

Few-shot Test-Time Domain Adaptation (FSTT-DA) seeks to adapt models to novel domains using only a handful of unlabeled target samples. This setting is more realistic than typical domain adaptation setups, which assume access to target data during source training. However, prior FSTT-DA approaches fail to effectively leverage source domain-specific knowledge, relying on shallow batch normalization updates, prompt-based methods that treat the model as a black box, or ensembling strategies that do not capture cross-domain relationships. To address these limitations, we introduce a new FSTT-DA framework that integrates LoRA fine-tuning with model merging. In our approach, separate LoRA modules are fine-tuned on CLIP's vision encoder for each source domain. Since LoRA modifies only a small fraction of the model's parameters, it retains the base model's generalized knowledge while internally learning domain-specific features. To adapt the learned knowledge to a specific target domain, we propose a hypernetwork trained via meta-learning that generates per-column merging factors to combine LoRA modules. Given a small batch of target images, the hypernetwork produces merging weights that fuse source LoRA modules into a single adapted representation. Our results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across various domain adaptation datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/nahbois4321/DA-MergeLoRA.
Siobhan Reid, Zhixiang Chi, Li Gu +3
Jul 19, 2026cs.CV

Orthogonal Knowledge Refreshing for Domain-Incremental Object Detection

Domain-incremental object detection (DIOD) requires models to continually adapt to new domains while preserving prior knowledge. Recently, parameter-efficient fine-tuning offers a promising avenue, wherein a pre-trained model is frozen and a small number of learnable parameters are injected for downstream tasks. However, these methods risk overwriting critical past knowledge, triggering inter-domain interference and performance degradation. To address this challenge, we propose Orthogonal Knowledge Refreshing (OKR), a simple yet effective framework for DIOD. OKR incrementally constructs independent domain-specific subspaces via dedicated low-rank branches for each domain, which are seamlessly fused for a holistic decision, enabling conflict-free capacity expansion without domain selection during inference. To minimize knowledge interference during fusion, we present a gradient-based orthogonal refreshing strategy that projects gradient updates of new domains onto the orthogonal complement of the fused historical subspace, supporting continual adaptation without forgetting. Moreover, to mitigate semantic fragmentation across domains, we enforce topology-aware consistency, aligning the semantic structures of old and new domains. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of OKR, outperforming the best exemplar-free method by significant margins of +5.6% and +6.5% mAP on the Pascal VOC and BDD100K series, respectively.
Aoting Zhang, Dongbao Yang, Chang Liu +3
Jul 18, 2026cs.CV

Can Multimodal Large Language Models Understand OCT?

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of retinal diseases. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated considerable potential in medical image analysis, existing benchmarks largely reduce OCT understanding to coarse-grained disease classification or isolated visual question answering, leaving the complete cognitive process from visual perception to clinical reasoning insufficiently evaluated. To address this limitation, we introduce OCT-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark dedicated to OCT image understanding. OCT-Bench comprises 10,076 high-quality multiple-choice questions constructed from 4,137 OCT images across seven public datasets. Following the real-world clinical interpretation workflow, we establish a hierarchical capability taxonomy consisting of 20 fine-grained tasks across three dimensions: Perception, Cognition, and Reasoning. These tasks cover a broad range of capabilities, including imaging attributes, retinal anatomy, lesion characteristics, spatial relationships, disease assessment, therapeutic decision-making, and prognostic management. We systematically evaluate 20 representative MLLMs, including proprietary models, open-source general-purpose models, and medical-domain models. Experimental results demonstrate that current models remain substantially short of reliable OCT understanding. Moreover, neither medical-domain adaptation nor increased model scale consistently improves performance across capability levels. OCT-Bench enables comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation of MLLMs, providing a foundation for identifying capability bottlenecks and advancing clinically grounded OCT understanding.
Baochen Fu, Wenzhi Deng, Baihao Jin +5
Jul 17, 2026cs.LG

DADiff: Diffusion-Driven Cross-Domain Policy Adaptation for Reinforcement Learning

Transferring policies across domains poses a vital challenge in reinforcement learning, due to the dynamics mismatch between the source and target domains. In this paper, we consider the setting of online dynamics adaptation, where policies are trained in the source domain with sufficient data, while only limited interactions with the target domain are allowed. There are a few existing works that address the dynamics mismatch by employing domain classifiers, value-guided data filtering, or representation learning. Instead, we study the domain adaptation problem from a generative modeling perspective. Specifically, we introduce DADiff, a diffusion-based framework that leverages the discrepancy between source and target domain generative trajectories in the generation process of the next state to estimate the dynamics mismatch. Both reward modification and data selection variants are developed to adapt the policy to the target domain. We also provide a theoretical analysis to show that the performance difference of a given policy between the two domains is bounded by the generative trajectory deviation. More discussions on the applicability of the variants and the connection between our theoretical analysis and the prior work are further provided. We conduct extensive experiments in environments with various shifts to validate the effectiveness of our method. The results demonstrate that our method provides superior performance compared to existing approaches, effectively addressing the dynamics mismatch. We provide the code of our method at https://github.com/hanyang-chen/DADiff-release
Hanyang Chen, Anirudh Satheesh, Longchao Da +1
Jul 16, 2026eess.IV

Domain Adaptation of Mismatched Proximal Denoiser for Plug-and-Play Image Reconstruction

Plug-and-play proximal gradient descent (PnP-PGD) enables flexible image reconstruction by using denoisers as implicit priors. In practice, these denoisers are often deployed outside their training domains. Existing analyses establish convergence under structural assumptions on the deployed denoiser, such as requiring it to be a proximal map or a contraction. However, they do not measure how domain mismatch affects convergence of PnP-PGD. We define this effect as \emph{proximal mismatch}: the discrepancy between a deployed denoiser D^\widehat{\mathsf D} and a target-domain reference map D=proxR\mathsf D_\star=\operatorname{prox}_{R_\star} associated with the underlying regularizer RR_\star. Under this mismatch, each denoising update becomes an inexact proximal step for the target objective. We further derive a stationarity bound that decays at a rate of O(1/K)\mathcal{O}(1/K), with an additive term proportional to the average squared proximal mismatch. This result motivates adaptation via proximal matching rather than MSE-based adaptation alone. We study this approach with two established denoiser families: learned proximal networks and gradient-step denoisers. Experiments on Gaussian deblurring and super-resolution under substantial domain shift show that proximal matching adaptation improves reconstruction quality significantly over MSE-based adaptation, yielding the largest numerical gains in the few-shot regime.
Guixian Xu, Jinglai Li, Junqi Tang
Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

XCT-SAM: Sequential Parameter-Efficient Domain Adaptation of SAM for Industrial XCT Defect Segmentation

Defect segmentation in additive manufacturing (AM) X-ray computed tomography (XCT) images remains challenging due to severe class imbalance and large distribution shifts across scan conditions. Although recent foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) provide strong general-purpose segmentation priors, their natural-image pre-training transfers poorly to the AM XCT domain, where defects appear as subtle non-semantic microstructural anomalies. Moreover, adapting SAM to the AM domain is further limited by the large domain gap and scarcity of labeled real XCT data. We present XCT-SAM, a sequential parameter-efficient adaptation framework for AM XCT defect segmentation. Instead of adapting SAM directly from natural images to XCT data, we first fine-tune Conv-LoRA adapters on an alloy-microstructure dataset and subsequently transfer the adapted model to XCT images, progressively bridging the domain gap. Using Conv-LoRA adapters with rank r=2, the framework injects convolutional spatial inductive bias into SAM's backbone while training approximately 4.15M parameters and keeping over 99% of the model frozen. We evaluate XCT-SAM on out-of-distribution CycleGAN-XCT benchmarks and real-world NIST XCT scans. Across both settings, XCT-SAM consistently outperforms zero-shot SAM and other domain-adapted SAM baselines, achieving the best overall IoU and Dice scores. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of intermediate domain adaptation with parameter-efficient adapters for industrial XCT defect segmentation. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Mahedi-61/XCT-SAM.git
Md Mahedi Hasan, Md Mushfiqur Rahaman, Alan Pachkovskiy +3
Jul 13, 2026cs.SD

Teaching Speech Enhancement Models to Sing: Domain Adaptation from Speech Enhancement to Singing Voice Separation

State-of-the-art speech enhancement models benefit from large-scale labeled datasets, whereas singing voice separation models suffer from limited available training data. To address this limitation, we formulate singing voice separation as domain adaptation from speech enhancement to singing voice separation. We investigate two fine-tuning strategies: full fine-tuning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on a discriminative and a generative model. Models with either adaptation strategy outperform the same architectures trained from scratch by 0.29-1.8 dB in Signal-to-Distortion-Ratio. Full fine-tuning yields the highest singing voice separation performance, but catastrophic forgetting degrades speech enhancement performance. LoRA fine-tuning achieves competitive singing voice separation performance while preserving the original speech enhancement capability with only 6-12% additional parameters compared to the base speech enhancement model. Furthermore, the generative model shows improved generalization to an unseen test set. The results demonstrate that adapting pretrained speech enhancement models is an effective strategy for training singing voice separation models in data-scarce scenarios.
Paul A. Bereuter, Mark D. Plumbley, Alois Sontacchi
Jul 11, 2026cs.CV

CVKD-UDA: Cross-View Knowledge Distillation for 3D Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Segmentation

3D unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) segmentation mitigates the high cost of manual annotations of the new domain data. Self-training has emerged as the dominant approach in this area, where its success heavily depends on a well-initialized warm-up model to generate reliable pseudo labels. However, existing methods often depend on source supervision or output-level adversarial alignment to obtain the warm-up model, which suffer from limited generalization and training instability due to the large domain gap between domains. Constructing domain-similar representations is an effective way to bridge this gap. In this work, we propose CVKD-UDA, which revisits voxel size as a core design factor to construct domain-similar representations and leverages cross-view complementary cues to balance transferability and discriminability of the warm-up model. First, we generate two complementary views by varying voxel sizes and introduce a cross-view knowledge distillation (CVKD) to enhance generalization and target perception of the model. Second, to balance transferability and discriminability, we design a lightweight Decouple-Adapter and an auxiliary imitation classifier to decouple cross-view knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that CVKD-UDA effectively improves the performance of self-training methods and provides a new perspective for 3D UDA segmentation. Our code will be available at GitHub.
Zhimin Yuan, Ming Cheng, Shangshu Yu +4