English

SPA++: Generalized Graph Spectral Alignment for Versatile Domain Adaptation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-08-11 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Domain Adaptation (DA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled or sparsely labeled target domain under domain shifts. Most prior works focus on capturing the inter-domain transferability but largely overlook rich intra-domain structures, which empirically results in even worse discriminability. To tackle this tradeoff, we propose a generalized graph SPectral Alignment framework, SPA++. Its core is briefly condensed as follows: (1)-by casting the DA problem to graph primitives, it composes a coarse graph alignment mechanism with a novel spectral regularizer toward aligning the domain graphs in eigenspaces; (2)-we further develop a fine-grained neighbor-aware propagation mechanism for enhanced discriminability in the target domain; (3)-by incorporating data augmentation and consistency regularization, SPA++ can adapt to complex scenarios including most DA settings and even challenging distribution scenarios. Furthermore, we also provide theoretical analysis to support our method, including the generalization bound of graph-based DA and the role of spectral alignment and smoothing consistency. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPA++ consistently outperforms existing cutting-edge methods, achieving superior robustness and adaptability across various challenging adaptation scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.05182,
  title  = {SPA++: Generalized Graph Spectral Alignment for Versatile Domain Adaptation},
  author = {Zhiqing Xiao and Haobo Wang and Xu Lu and Wentao Ye and Gang Chen and Junbo Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.05182},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

The article has been accepted by Frontiers of Computer Science (FCS), with the DOI: {10.1007/s11704-025-50328-w}. It is an extended journal version of the conference paper arXiv:2310.17594

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:38:42.445Z