Structure‐Based Uncertainty Estimation for Source‐Free Active Domain Adaptation

ABSTRACT Active domain adaptation (active DA) provides an effective solution by selectively labelling a limited number of target samples to significantly enhance adaptation performance. However, existing active DA methods often struggle in real‐world scenarios where, due to data privacy concerns, only a pre‐trained source model is available, rather than the source samples. To address this issue, we propose a novel method called the structure‐based uncertainty estimation model (SUEM) for source‐free active domain adaptation (SFADA). To be specific, we introduce an innovative active sample selection strategy that combines both uncertainty and diversity sampling to identify the most informative samples. We assess the uncertainty in target samples using structure‐wise probabilities and implement a diversity selection method to minimise redundancy. For the selected samples, we not only apply standard‐supervised loss but also conduct interpolation consistency training to further explore the structural information of the target domain. Extensive experiments across four widely used datasets demonstrate that our method is comparable to or outperforms current UDA and active DA methods.