Domain-Adversarial Learning

Overview

Domain-adversarial learning studies how to make models work across domains, such as different hospitals, devices, users, imaging modalities, or time periods. A common approach uses a domain discriminator and gradient reversal to encourage domain-invariant features, often combined with feature alignment, contrastive learning, class prototypes, or pseudo-labeling. These methods are used in supervised and unsupervised adaptation, including settings where target-domain labels are scarce or unavailable. A central tension is that removing domain information can also discard useful task information: alignment may fail under label shift or harm representations that already encode relevant domain knowledge, so invariance does not guarantee better transfer.

Latest papers

35 papers6 papers in the last four weeks, up 100% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Mar 18, 2026

Boundary-aware Prototype-driven Adversarial Alignment for Cross-Corpus EEG Emotion Recognition

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition suffers from severe performance degradation when models are transferred across heterogeneous datasets due to physiological variability, experimental paradigm differences, and device inconsistencies. Existing domain adversarial methods primarily enforce global marginal alignment and often overlook class-conditional mismatch and decision boundary distortion, limiting cross-corpus generalization. In this work, we propose a unified Prototype-driven Adversarial Alignment (PAA) framework for cross-corpus EEG emotion recognition. The framework is progressively instantiated in three configurations: PAA-L, which performs prototype-guided local class-conditional alignment; PAA-C, which further incorporates contrastive semantic regularization to enhance intra-class compactness and inter-class separability; and PAA-M, the full boundary-aware configuration that integrates dual relation-aware classifiers within a three-stage adversarial optimization scheme to explicitly refine controversial samples near decision boundaries. By combining prototype-guided subdomain alignment, contrastive discriminative enhancement, and boundary-aware aggregation within a coherent adversarial architecture, the proposed framework reformulates emotion recognition as a relation-driven representation learning problem, reducing sensitivity to label noise and improving cross-domain stability. Extensive experiments on SEED, SEED-IV, and SEED-V demonstrate state-of-the-art performance under four cross-corpus evaluation protocols, with average improvements of 6.72%, 5.59%, 6.69%, and 4.83%, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed framework generalizes effectively to clinical depression identification scenarios, validating its robustness in real-world heterogeneous settings. The source code is available at https://github.com/WuCB-BCI/PAA
Mar 17, 2026

Robust Generative Audio Quality Assessment: Disentangling Quality from Spurious Correlations

The rapid proliferation of AI-Generated Content (AIGC) has necessitated robust metrics for perceptual quality assessment. However, automatic Mean Opinion Score (MOS) prediction models are often compromised by data scarcity, predisposing them to learn spurious correlations-- such as dataset-specific acoustic signatures-- rather than generalized quality features. To address this, we leverage domain adversarial training (DAT) to disentangle true quality perception from these nuisance factors. Unlike prior works that rely on static domain priors, we systematically investigate domain definition strategies ranging from explicit metadata-driven labels to implicit data-driven clusters. Our findings reveal that there is no "one-size-fits-all" domain definition; instead, the optimal strategy is highly dependent on the specific MOS aspect being evaluated. Experimental results demonstrate that our aspect-specific domain strategy effectively mitigates acoustic biases, significantly improving correlation with human ratings and achieving superior generalization on unseen generative scenarios.
Mar 9, 2026

Adversarial Domain Adaptation Enables Knowledge Transfer Across Heterogeneous RNA-Seq Datasets

Accurate phenotype prediction from RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data is essential for diagnosis, biomarker discovery, and personalized medicine. Deep learning models have demonstrated strong potential to outperform classical machine learning approaches, but their performance relies on large, well-annotated datasets. In transcriptomics, such datasets are frequently limited, leading to over-fitting and poor generalization. Knowledge transfer from larger, more general datasets can alleviate this issue. However, transferring information across RNA-seq datasets remains challenging due to heterogeneous preprocessing pipelines and differences in target phenotypes. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based domain adaptation framework that enables effective knowledge transfer from a large general dataset to a smaller one for cancer type classification. The method learns a domain-invariant latent space by jointly optimizing classification and domain alignment objectives. To ensure stable training and robustness in data-scarce scenarios, the framework is trained with an adversarial approach with appropriate regularization. Both supervised and unsupervised approach variants are explored, leveraging labeled or unlabeled target samples. The framework is evaluated on three large-scale transcriptomic datasets (TCGA, ARCHS4, GTEx) to assess its ability to transfer knowledge across cohorts. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in cancer and tissue type classification accuracy compared to non-adaptive baselines, particularly in low-data scenarios. Overall, this work highlights domain adaptation as a powerful strategy for data-efficient knowledge transfer in transcriptomics, enabling robust phenotype prediction under constrained data conditions.
Mar 5, 2026

Unsupervised domain adaptation for radioisotope identification in gamma spectroscopy

Training machine learning models for radioisotope identification using gamma spectroscopy remains an elusive challenge for many practical applications, largely stemming from the difficulty of acquiring and labeling large, diverse experimental datasets. Simulations can mitigate this challenge, but the accuracy of models trained on simulated data can deteriorate substantially when deployed to an out-of-distribution operational environment. In this study, we demonstrate that unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) can improve the ability of a model trained on synthetic data to generalize to a new testing domain, provided unlabeled data from the target domain is available. Conventional supervised techniques are unable to utilize this data because the absence of isotope labels precludes defining a supervised classification loss. We compare a range of different UDA techniques, finding that feature alignment strategies, particularly via maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) minimization or domain-adversarial training, yield the most consistent improvement to testing scores. For instance, using a custom transformer-based neural network, we achieve a testing accuracy of 0.904±0.0220.904 \pm 0.022 on an experimental LaBr3_3 test set after performing unsupervised feature alignment via MMD minimization, compared to 0.754±0.0140.754 \pm 0.014 before alignment. Overall, our results highlight the potential of using UDA to adapt a radioisotope classifier trained on synthetic data for real-world deployment.
Mar 5, 2026

Embedded Inter-Subject Variability in Adversarial Learning for Inertial Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition

This paper addresses the problem of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using data from wearable inertial sensors. An important challenge in HAR is the model's generalization capabilities to new unseen individuals due to inter-subject variability, i.e., the same activity is performed differently by different individuals. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep adversarial framework that integrates the concept of inter-subject variability in the adversarial task, thereby encouraging subject-invariant feature representations and enhancing the classification performance in the HAR problem. Our approach outperforms previous methods in three well-established HAR datasets using a leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation. Further results indicate that our proposed adversarial task effectively reduces inter-subject variability among different users in the feature space, and it outperforms adversarial tasks from previous works when integrated into our framework. Code: https://github.com/FranciscoCalatrava/EmbeddedSubjectVariability.git