Adversarial Alignment with Anchor Dragging Drift (A3D2): Multimodal Domain Adaptation with Partially Shifted Modalities

Jun Sun, Xinxin Zhang, Simin Hong, Jian Zhu, Lingfang Zeng


Abstract
Multimodal learning has celebrated remarkable success across diverse areas, yet faces the challenge of prohibitively expensive data collection and annotation when adapting models to new environments. In this context, domain adaptation has gained growing popularity as a technique for knowledge transfer, which, however, remains underexplored in multimodal settings compared with unimodal ones. This paper investigates multimodal domain adaptation, focusing on a practical partially shifting scenario where some modalities (referred to as anchors) remain domain-stable, while others (referred to as drifts) undergo a domain shift. We propose a bi-alignment scheme to simultaneously perform drift-drift and anchor-drift matching. The former is achieved through adversarial learning, aligning the representations of the drifts across source and target domains; the latter corresponds to an “anchor dragging drift” strategy, which matches the distributions of the drifts and anchors within the target domain using the optimal transport (OT) method. The overall design principle features Adversarial Alignment with Anchor Dragging Drift, abbreviated as A3D2, for multimodal domain adaptation with partially shifted modalities. Comprehensive empirical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and demonstrate that A3D2 achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at: https://github.com/sunjunaimer/A3D2.git.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.967
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19680–19690
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.967/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jun Sun, Xinxin Zhang, Simin Hong, Jian Zhu, and Lingfang Zeng. 2025. Adversarial Alignment with Anchor Dragging Drift (A3D2): Multimodal Domain Adaptation with Partially Shifted Modalities. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 19680–19690, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Adversarial Alignment with Anchor Dragging Drift (A3D2): Multimodal Domain Adaptation with Partially Shifted Modalities (Sun et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.967.pdf