Key Design Choices in Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: An In-depth Empirical Analysis
<|reference_start|>Key Design Choices in Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: An In-depth Empirical Analysis: This study provides a comprehensive benchmark framework for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SF-UDA) in image classification, aiming to achieve a rigorous empirical understanding of the complex relationships between multiple key design factors in SF-UDA methods. The study empirically examines a diverse set of SF-UDA techniques, assessing their consistency across datasets, sensitivity to specific hyperparameters, and applicability across different families of backbone architectures. Moreover, it exhaustively evaluates pre-training datasets and strategies, particularly focusing on both supervised and self-supervised methods, as well as the impact of fine-tuning on the source domain. Our analysis also highlights gaps in existing benchmark practices, guiding SF-UDA research towards more effective and general approaches. It emphasizes the importance of backbone architecture and pre-training dataset selection on SF-UDA performance, serving as an essential reference and providing key insights. Lastly, we release the source code of our experimental framework. This facilitates the construction, training, and testing of SF-UDA methods, enabling systematic large-scale experimental analysis and supporting further research efforts in this field.<|reference_end|>
@article{maracani2024key,
    title={Key Design Choices in Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: An
  In-depth Empirical Analysis},
    author={Andrea Maracani, Raffaello Camoriano, Elisa Maiettini, Davide Talon,
  Lorenzo Rosasco and Lorenzo Natale},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.16090},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2402.16090},
    primaryClass={cs.CV cs.LG}
}