CoDA: A Cognitive-Inspired Approach for Domain Adaptation

Modern neural networks have achieved remarkable success in visual recognition; however, due to their sensitivity to domain shifts, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) remains an open research problem. A key reason for this limitation is that source-trained models rely primarily on texture, lacking the explicit geometric information required for object recognition. To overcome this problem, we introduce CoDA, an object-centric learning framework inspired by infant cognitive development, specifically the process of object individuation. By introducing a geometric prior, our approach employs a physically grounded generation pipeline that uses a textureless “Sculpture Mode” and object isolation to complement textural information with 3D geometric features, capturing shape information that is often ignored during training. To enable robust training from scratch, we further integrate two control mechanisms: a Network Stability Scheduler to orchestrate training progression based on convergence stability, and a Dynamic Top-K Pseudo-Labeling strategy that adapts confidence thresholds for each individual class. Extensive evaluations on three real-world target datasets (VegFru, Fruits-262, and Open Images v7) demonstrate that CoDA, trained on a source dataset of just 12,000 synthetic images, achieves comparable results to (and in specific domains surpasses) ImageNet-pretrained models (leveraging 1.2 million images), significantly outperforming state-of-the-art adversarial and semi-supervised domain adaptation methods.