Unraveling the Mysteries of Label Noise in Source-Free Domain Adaptation: Theory and Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) methods have focused on learning meaningful cluster structures in feature space, successfully adapting the knowledge from the source domain to the unlabeled target domain without accessing the private source data. However, existing methods rely on pseudo-labels generated by source models that can be noisy due to domain shift, presenting a significant challenge to their efficacy. In this paper, we study SFDA from the perspective of learning with label noise (LLN) and prove that the label noise in SFDA, unlike in conventional LLN scenarios, follows a different distribution assumption. This discrepancy renders some existing LLN methods less effective in SFDA. To address this issue and comprehensively improve adaptation performance, we tackle label noise in SFDA from two perspectives. First, we demonstrate that the early-time training phenomenon (ETP), previously observed in LLN settings, still exists in SFDA. Hence, we introduce a simple yet effective approach to leveraging ETP to improve current SFDA algorithms. Second, we propose a noise and variance control module, mitigating the label noise discrepancy between SFDA and LLN and enhancing the effectiveness of LLN methods in SFDA. Extensive empirical evaluation and analysis of four benchmarks show that our methods substantially outperform existing baselines.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".