Interpretable Open-Set Domain Adaptation via Angular Margin Separation

Abstract

Open-set Domain Adaptation (OSDA) aims to recognize classes in the target domain that are seen in the source domain while rejecting other unseen target-exclusive classes into an unknown class, which ignores the diversity of the latter and is therefore incapable of their interpretation. The recently-proposed Semantic Recovery OSDA (SR-OSDA) brings in semantic attributes and attacks the challenge via partial alignment and visual-semantic projection, marking the first step towards interpretable OSDA. Following that line, in this work, we propose a representation learning framework termed Angular Margin Separation (AMS) that unveils the power of discriminative and robust representation for both open-set domain adaptation and cross-domain semantic recovery. Our core idea is to exploit an additive angular margin with regularization for both robust feature fine-tuning and discriminative joint feature alignment, which turns out advantageous to learning an accurate and less biased visual-semantic projection. Further, we propose a post-training re-projection that boosts the performance of seen classes interpretation without deterioration on unseen classes. Verified by extensive experiments, AMS achieves a notable improvement over the existing SR-OSDA baseline, with an average 7.6% increment in semantic recovery accuracy of unseen classes in multiple transfer tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/LeoXinhaoLee/AMS.