Label Space-Induced Pseudo Label Refinement for Multi-Source Black-Box Domain Adaptation

Conventional unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) requires access to source data and/or source model parameters, prohibiting its practical application in terms of privacy, security, and intellectual property. Recent black-box UDA (BDA) reduces such constraints by defining a pseudo label from a single encapsulated source application programming interface (API) prediction, which allows for self-training of the target model. Nonetheless, existing methods have limited consideration for multi-source settings, in which multiple source domain APIs are available to generate pseudo labels. In this work, we introduce a novel training framework for multi-source BDA (MSBDA), dubbed Label Space-Induced Pseudo Label Refinement (LPR). Specifically, LPR incorporates a Pseudo label Refinery Network (PRN) that learns the relationship among source domains conditioned by the target domain only utilizing source API’s prediction. The target model is adapted by our dual phases PRN. First, a warm-up phase targets to avoid failure due to noisy samples and provide an initial pseudo-label, which is followed by a label refinement phase with domain relationship exploration. We provide theoretical support for the mechanism of the LPR. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that MSBDA using LPR achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches with different DA settings.