Feature-Space Planes Searcher: A Universal Domain Adaptation Framework for Interpretability and Computational Efficiency

Domain shift, characterized by degraded model performance during the transfer from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains, poses a persistent challenge for deploying deep learning systems. Current unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods predominantly rely on fine-tuning feature extractors-an approach limited by high computational cost, reduced interpretability, and poor scalability to modern architectures. Our analysis reveals that models pre-trained on large-scale data exhibit domain-invariant geometric patterns in their feature space, characterized by intra-class clustering and inter-class separation, thereby preserving transferable discriminative structures. These findings suggest that cross-domain performance degradation is often associated with decision-boundary misalignment, and that correcting such misalignment can serve as an effective alternative to feature adaptation, particularly when pretrained representations are sufficiently strong. Unlike fine-tuning entire pre-trained models, which risks introducing unpredictable feature distortions, we propose the Feature-space Planes Searcher (FPS): a novel domain adaptation framework that optimizes decision boundaries by leveraging these geometric patterns while keeping the feature encoder frozen. This streamlined approach enables interpretable analysis of adaptation while substantially reducing memory and computational costs through offline feature extraction, permitting full-dataset optimization in a single training cycle. Moreover, we introduce an Intra-Class Distance Metric (ICDM) that enables fully unsupervised hyperparameter selection without requiring target-domain labels. Evaluations on public benchmarks show that FPS achieves competitive performance across standard benchmarks, with notable gains in several settings and tasks. FPS scales efficiently with large multimodal models and shows versatility across diverse domains including protein structure prediction, remote sensing classification, and earthquake detection. We anticipate FPS will provide a simple, effective, and generalizable framework for domain adaptation tasks.