The comparison of density estimation for transfer learning in Banach, Hilbert, Euclidean spaces

Maryam Alsadat Kazemian, Azam Bastanfard

Domain adaptation or DA methods are indispensable when target labels or computational resources are scarce, yet the domain kernel density and subspace alignment approaches completely assume a Hilbertian geometry. They measure distributional discrepancy with symmetric L2 divergences over Euclidean feature spaces or reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS). This preprint summarizes the manuscript Non-Hilbertian Domain Adaptation. Total Variation Alignment via L1 Density Regularization on Feature Manifolds, which proposes Banach Manifold Transfer Learning or BMTL. BMTL makes two coupled design decisions. The first one is that features are embedded on a geodesic manifold rather than treated as points of a flat Euclidean space, and the second one is that the density matching regularizer is formulated in an L1 Banach norm, whose minimization is equivalent, by Scheffe's theorem, to contracting the Total Variation or TV distance between domain densities, a bounded metric that weights all regions of the sample space uniformly. The L2 formulation, by contrast, squares deviations and therefore amplifies errors in the tails, over emphasizing density outliers that do not reflect meaningful…