Learning To Diversify for Single Domain Generalization

Zijian Wang, Yadan Luo, Ruihong Qiu, Zi Huang, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 834-843

Domain generalization (DG) aims to generalize a model trained on multiple source (i.e., training) domains to a distributionally different target (i.e., test) domain. In contrast to the DG setup that strictly requires the availability of multiple source domains, this paper considers a more realistic yet challenging scenario, namely Single Domain Generalization (SDG). In this new setting, there is only one source domain available for training, from which the limited diversity may jeopardize the model generalization on unseen target domains. To tackle this problem, we propose a style-complement module to enhance the generalization power of the model by synthesizing images from diverse distributions that are complementary to the source ones. More specifically, we adopt tractable upper and lower bounds of mutual information (MI) between the generated and source samples and perform the two-step optimization iteratively: (1) by minimizing MI upper bound approximation for each pair, the generated images are forced to diversify from the source samples; (2) subsequently, we maximize the lower bound of MI between the samples from the same semantic category, which assists the network to learn discriminative features from diverse-styled images. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach, which surpasses the state-of-the-art single DG methods by up to 25.14%.