In this study, we focus on the unsupervised domain adaptation problem where an approximate inference model is to be learned from a labeled data domain and expected to generalize well to an unlabeled data domain. The success of unsupervised domain adaptation largely relies on the cross-domain feature alignment. Previous work has attempted to directly align latent features by the classifier-induced discrepancies. Nevertheless, a common feature space cannot always be learned via this direct feature alignment especially when a large domain gap exists. To solve this problem, we introduce a Gaussian-guided latent alignment approach to align the latent feature distributions of the two domains under the guidance of the prior distribution. In such an indirect way, the distributions over the samples from the two domains will be constructed on a common feature space, i.e., the space of the prior, which promotes better feature alignment. To effectively align the target latent distribution with this prior distribution, we also propose a novel unpaired L1-distance by taking advantage of the formulation of the encoder-decoder. The extensive evaluations on eight benchmark datasets validate the superior knowledge transferability through outperforming state-of-the-art methods and the versatility of the proposed method by improving the existing work significantly.

该研究关注无监督域自适应问题，提出了一种基于高斯引导潜在对齐方法，通过先验分布间接对齐两个域的潜在特征分布来提高特征对齐性和实现知识转移，并在九个基准数据集上取得了优秀表现。

区分性特征对齐：通过高斯引导的潜在对齐提高无监督领域自适应的可传递性