DandelionNet: Domain Composition with Instance Adaptive Classification for Domain Generalization

Domain generalization (DG) attempts to learn a model on source domains that can well generalize to unseen but different domains. The multiple source domains are innately different in distribution but intrinsically related to each other, e.g., from the same label space. To achieve a generalizable feature, most existing methods attempt to reduce the domain discrepancy by either learning domain-invariant feature, or additionally mining domain-specific feature. In the space of these features, the multiple source domains are either tightly aligned or not aligned at all, which both cannot fully take the advantage of complementary information from multiple domains. In order to preserve more complementary information from multiple domains at the meantime of reducing their domain gap, we propose that the multiple domains should not be tightly aligned but composite together, where all domains are pulled closer but still preserve their individuality respectively. This is achieved by using instance-adaptive classifier specified for each instance’s classification, where the instance-adaptive classifier is slightly deviated from a universal classifier shared by samples from all domains. This adaptive classifier deviation allows all instances from the same category but different domains to be dispersed around the class center rather than squeezed tightly, leading to better generalization for unseen domain samples. In result, the multiple domains are harmoniously composite centered on a universal core, like a dandelion, so this work is referred to as DandelionNet. Experiments on multiple DG benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method can learn a model with better generalization and experiments on source free domain adaption also indicate the versatility.