Robust Domain Adaptive Hashing via Structural Noise Modeling and Correction

Abstract Deep hashing offers efficient storage and fast retrieval capabilities. As a result, it has been extensively applied to large‑scale retrieval tasks. To alleviate the dependence on high-quality annotated data, recent research has focused on unsupervised domain adaptive hashing methods, which aim to transfer knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a label-scarce target domain. However, in open-world scenarios, source domain labels are often inevitably noisy, which tends to undermine the quality of learned hash codes and induce considerable performance deterioration. To this end, we introduce a novel Robust Domain Adaptive Hashing (RDAH) method to jointly mitigate the adverse effects of label noise and domain discrepancy. Specifically, we first model the loss distribution of training samples using a two-component Gaussian mixture model to estimate each sample’s confidence, based on which the data is partitioned. Subsequently, we introduce a neighbor consistency-guided correction strategy, which leverages the semantic structure of high-confidence neighbors to perform weighted correction on noisy samples. Moreover, we design a dual-level cross-domain alignment mechanism that jointly mitigates domain shift from two complementary perspectives. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness and robustness of RDAH across multiple benchmark datasets.