Target-Oriented Single Domain Generalization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Heidari, Marzi, Guo, Yuhong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Heidari, Marzi
Guo, Yuhong
author_facet Heidari, Marzi
Guo, Yuhong
contents Deep models trained on a single source domain often fail catastrophically under distribution shifts, a critical challenge in Single Domain Generalization (SDG). While existing methods focus on augmenting source data or learning invariant features, they neglect a readily available resource: textual descriptions of the target deployment environment. We propose Target-Oriented Single Domain Generalization (TO-SDG), a novel problem setup that leverages the textual description of the target domain, without requiring any target data, to guide model generalization. To address TO-SDG, we introduce Spectral TARget Alignment (STAR), a lightweight module that injects target semantics into source features by exploiting visual-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP. STAR uses a target-anchored subspace derived from the text embedding of the target description to recenter image features toward the deployment domain, then utilizes spectral projection to retain directions aligned with target cues while discarding source-specific noise. Moreover, we use a vision-language distillation to align backbone features with VLM's semantic geometry. STAR further employs feature-space Mixup to ensure smooth transitions between source and target-oriented representations. Experiments across various image classification and object detection benchmarks demonstrate STAR's superiority. This work establishes that minimal textual metadata, which is a practical and often overlooked resource, significantly enhances generalization under severe data constraints, opening new avenues for deploying robust models in target environments with unseen data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_00351
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Target-Oriented Single Domain Generalization
Heidari, Marzi
Guo, Yuhong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Deep models trained on a single source domain often fail catastrophically under distribution shifts, a critical challenge in Single Domain Generalization (SDG). While existing methods focus on augmenting source data or learning invariant features, they neglect a readily available resource: textual descriptions of the target deployment environment. We propose Target-Oriented Single Domain Generalization (TO-SDG), a novel problem setup that leverages the textual description of the target domain, without requiring any target data, to guide model generalization. To address TO-SDG, we introduce Spectral TARget Alignment (STAR), a lightweight module that injects target semantics into source features by exploiting visual-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP. STAR uses a target-anchored subspace derived from the text embedding of the target description to recenter image features toward the deployment domain, then utilizes spectral projection to retain directions aligned with target cues while discarding source-specific noise. Moreover, we use a vision-language distillation to align backbone features with VLM's semantic geometry. STAR further employs feature-space Mixup to ensure smooth transitions between source and target-oriented representations. Experiments across various image classification and object detection benchmarks demonstrate STAR's superiority. This work establishes that minimal textual metadata, which is a practical and often overlooked resource, significantly enhances generalization under severe data constraints, opening new avenues for deploying robust models in target environments with unseen data.
title Target-Oriented Single Domain Generalization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00351