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Glossary
Definition

Domain Adaptation

Closing the gap when a model trained on one data distribution gets deployed on a shifted one, without collecting new labels for the new distribution.

Covariate shift means the input distribution changes between the source and target domains while the true input-output relationship stays fixed — unlike concept shift, where the task's actual definition changes. Domain-adversarial training pushes internal features toward a form a domain classifier can't distinguish, so behavior learned on the source domain transfers to the target one.

It's typically framed as unsupervised: the target domain has no labels at all to fine-tune on.