Learning to learn, from transfer learning to domain adaptation: A unifying perspective

The transfer learning and domain adaptation problems originate from a distribution mismatch between the source and target data distribution. The causes of such mismatch are traditionally considered different. Thus, transfer learn- ing and domain adaptation algorithms are designed to ad- dress different issues, and cannot be used in both settings unless substantially modified. Still, one might argue that these problems are just different declinations of learning to learn, i.e. the ability to leverage over prior knowledge when attempting to solve a new task. We propose a learning to learn framework able to lever- age over source data regardless of the origin of the distri- bution mismatch. We consider prior models as experts, and use their output confidence value as features. We use them to build the new target model, combined with the features from the target data through a high-level cue integration scheme. This results in a class of algorithms usable in a plug-and-play fashion over any learning to learn scenario, from binary and multi-class transfer learning to single and multiple source domain adaptation settings. Experiments on several public datasets show that our approach consis- tently achieves the state of the art. © 2014 IEEE.