Transfer Learning with Multiple Sources via Consensus Regularized Autoencoders

Knowledge transfer from multiple source domains to a target domain is crucial in transfer learning. Most existing methods are focused on learning weights for different domains based on the similarities between each source domain and the target domain or learning more precise classifiers from the source domain data jointly by maximizing their consensus of predictions on the target domain data. However, these methods only consider measuring similarities or building classifiers on the original data space, and fail to discover a more powerful feature representation of the data when transferring knowledge from multiple source domains to the target domain. In this paper, we propose a new framework for transfer learning with multiple source domains. Specifically, in the proposed framework, we adopt autoencoders to construct a feature mapping from an original instance to a hidden representation, and train multiple classifiers from the source domain data jointly by performing an entropy-based consensus regularizer on the predictions on the target domain. Based on the framework, a particular solution is proposed to learn the hidden representation and classifiers simultaneously. Experimental results on image and text real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method compared with state-of-the-art methods.