TransPL: VQ-Code Transition Matrices for Pseudo-Labeling of Time Series Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Abstract

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for time series data remains a critical challenge in deep learning, with traditional pseudo-labeling strategies failing to capture temporal patterns and channel-wise shifts between domains, producing sub-optimal pseudo labels. As such, we introduce TransPL, a novel approach that addresses these limitations by modeling the joint distribution $P(X,y)$ of the source domain through code transition matrices, where the codes are derived from vector quantization (VQ) of time series patches. Our method constructs class- and channel-wise code transition matrices from the source domain and employs Bayes’ rule for target domain adaptation, generating pseudo-labels based on channel-wise weighted class-conditional likelihoods. TransPL offers three key advantages: explicit modeling of temporal transitions and channel-wise shifts between different domains, versatility towards different UDA scenarios (e.g., weakly-supervised UDA), and explainable pseudo-label generation. We validate TransPL’s effectiveness through extensive analysis on four time series UDA benchmarks and confirm that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art pseudo-labeling methods by a strong margin (6.1% accuracy improvement, 4.9% F1 improvement), while providing interpretable insights into the domain adaptation process through its learned code transition matrices.