Learning Domain Trajectories with Flow Matching for Gradual Domain Adaptation

Abstract

Large distribution shifts remain a primary obstacle for domain generalization and unsupervised adaptation. Although gradual domain adaptation alleviates this difficulty by introducing ordered intermediate domains, most existing approaches still operate in a discrete, step-wise manner, which can accumulate errors and often relies on unstable Min--Max optimization. We propose \textbf{FlowGDA}, a flow-matching framework that models gradual adaptation as \emph{continuous} transport on a statistical manifold in a representation space. FlowGDA learns time-dependent velocity fields that induce smooth domain trajectories, using a simulation-free regression objective rather than adversarial training. To prevent semantic drift, we couple left-to-right transport between consecutive domains with a source-anchored transport and a semantic consistency loss, and we further stabilize learning via a two-stage sequential optimization scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, validating flow matching as an effective alternative for domain adaptation.