For a target task where labeled data is unavailable, domain adaptation can transfer a learner from a different source domain. Previous deep domain adaptation methods mainly learn a global domain shift, i.e., align the global source and target distributions without considering the relationships between two subdomains within the same category of different domains, leading to unsatisfying transfer learning performance without capturing the fine-grained information. Recently, more and more researchers pay attention to Subdomain Adaptation which focuses on accurately aligning the distributions of the relevant subdomains. However, most of them are adversarial methods which contain several loss functions and converge slowly. Based on this, we present Deep Subdomain Adaptation Network (DSAN) which learns a transfer network by aligning the relevant subdomain distributions of domain-specific layer activations across different domains based on a local maximum mean discrepancy (LMMD). Our DSAN is very simple but effective which does not need adversarial training and converges fast. The adaptation can be achieved easily with most feed-forward network models by extending them with LMMD loss, which can be trained efficiently via back-propagation. Experiments demonstrate that DSAN can achieve remarkable results on both object recognition tasks and digit classification tasks. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/easezyc/deep-transfer-learning

Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) are an important framework that models coordinated decision-making problem in multi-agent systems with a set of discrete variables. Later work has extended this to model problems with a set of continuous variables (F-DCOPs). In this paper, we combine both of these models into the Mixed Integer Functional DCOP (MIF-DCOP) model that can deal with problems regardless of its variables' type. We then propose a novel algorithm, called Distributed Parallel Simulated Annealing (DPSA), where agents cooperatively learn the optimal parameter configuration for the algorithm while also solving the given problem using the learned knowledge. Finally, we empirically benchmark our approach in DCOP, F-DCOP and MIF-DCOP settings and show that DPSA produces solutions of significantly better quality than the state-of-the-art non-exact algorithms in their corresponding setting.

In this paper, we propose Double Supervised Network with Attention Mechanism (DSAN), a novel end-to-end trainable framework for scene text recognition. It incorporates one text attention module during feature extraction which enforces the model to focus on text regions and the whole framework is supervised by two branches. One supervision branch comes from context-level modelling and another comes from one extra supervision enhancement branch which aims at tackling inexplicit semantic information at character level. These two supervisions can benefit each other and yield better performance. The proposed approach can recognize text in arbitrary length and does not need any predefined lexicon. Our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on three text recognition benchmarks: IIIT5K, ICDAR2013 and SVT reaching accuracy 88.6%, 92.3% and 84.1% respectively which suggests the effectiveness of the proposed method.