Deep Domain Generalization via Conditional Invariant Adversarial Networks

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 vertical bar 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 vertical bar 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.