Deep Domain Generalization via Conditional Invariant Adversarial Networks

Ya Li, Xinmei Tian, Mingming Gong, Yajing Liu, Tongliang Liu, Kun Zhang, Dacheng Tao; The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 624-639

Domain generalization aims to learn a classification model from multiple source domains and generalize it to unseen target domains. A critical problem in domain generalization involves learning domain-invariant representations. Let $X$ and $Y$ denote the features and the labels, respectively. Under the assumption that the conditional distribution $P(Y|X)$ remains unchanged across domains, earlier approaches to domain generalization learned the invariant representation $T(X)$ by minimizing the discrepancy of the marginal distribution $P(T(X))$. However, such an assumption of stable $P(Y|X)$ does not necessarily hold in practice. In addition, the representation learning function $T(X)$ is usually constrained to a simple linear transformation or shallow networks. To address the above two drawbacks, we propose an end-to-end conditional invariant deep domain generalization approach by leveraging deep neural networks for domain-invariant representation learning. The domain-invariance property is guaranteed through a conditional invariant adversarial network that can learn domain-invariant representations w.r.t. the joint distribution $P(T(X),Y)$ if the target domain data are not severely class unbalanced. We perform various experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.