Connecting Domains and Contrasting Samples: A Ladder for Domain Generalization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wei, Tianxin, Chen, Yifan, He, Xinrui, Bao, Wenxuan, He, Jingrui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wei, Tianxin
Chen, Yifan
He, Xinrui
Bao, Wenxuan
He, Jingrui
author_facet Wei, Tianxin
Chen, Yifan
He, Xinrui
Bao, Wenxuan
He, Jingrui
contents Distribution shifts between training and testing samples frequently occur in practice and impede model generalization performance. This crucial challenge thereby motivates studies on domain generalization (DG), which aim to predict the label on unseen target domain data by solely using data from source domains. It is intuitive to conceive the class-separated representations learned in contrastive learning (CL) are able to improve DG, while the reality is quite the opposite: users observe directly applying CL deteriorates the performance. We analyze the phenomenon with the insights from CL theory and discover lack of intra-class connectivity in the DG setting causes the deficiency. We thus propose a new paradigm, domain-connecting contrastive learning (DCCL), to enhance the conceptual connectivity across domains and obtain generalizable representations for DG. On the data side, more aggressive data augmentation and cross-domain positive samples are introduced to improve intra-class connectivity. On the model side, to better embed the unseen test domains, we propose model anchoring to exploit the intra-class connectivity in pre-trained representations and complement the anchoring with generative transformation loss. Extensive experiments on five standard DG benchmarks are performed. The results verify that DCCL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines even without domain supervision. The detailed model implementation and the code are provided through https://github.com/weitianxin/DCCL
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_16704
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Connecting Domains and Contrasting Samples: A Ladder for Domain Generalization
Wei, Tianxin
Chen, Yifan
He, Xinrui
Bao, Wenxuan
He, Jingrui
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Distribution shifts between training and testing samples frequently occur in practice and impede model generalization performance. This crucial challenge thereby motivates studies on domain generalization (DG), which aim to predict the label on unseen target domain data by solely using data from source domains. It is intuitive to conceive the class-separated representations learned in contrastive learning (CL) are able to improve DG, while the reality is quite the opposite: users observe directly applying CL deteriorates the performance. We analyze the phenomenon with the insights from CL theory and discover lack of intra-class connectivity in the DG setting causes the deficiency. We thus propose a new paradigm, domain-connecting contrastive learning (DCCL), to enhance the conceptual connectivity across domains and obtain generalizable representations for DG. On the data side, more aggressive data augmentation and cross-domain positive samples are introduced to improve intra-class connectivity. On the model side, to better embed the unseen test domains, we propose model anchoring to exploit the intra-class connectivity in pre-trained representations and complement the anchoring with generative transformation loss. Extensive experiments on five standard DG benchmarks are performed. The results verify that DCCL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines even without domain supervision. The detailed model implementation and the code are provided through https://github.com/weitianxin/DCCL
title Connecting Domains and Contrasting Samples: A Ladder for Domain Generalization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16704