The objective of domain generalization (DG) is to enhance the transferability of the model learned from a source domain to unobserved domains. To prevent overfitting to a specific domain, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) reduces the sharpness of the source domain's loss landscape. Although SAM and its variants have delivered significant improvements in DG, we highlight that there's still potential for improvement in generalizing to unknown domains through the exploration on data space. Building on this motivation, this paper introduces an objective rooted in both parameter and data perturbed regions for domain generalization, termed Unknown Domain Inconsistency Minimization (UDIM). UDIM reduces the loss landscape inconsistency between source domain and unknown domains. As unknown domains are inaccessible, these domains are empirically crafted by perturbing instances from the source domain dataset. In particular, by aligning the flat minima acquired in the source domain to the loss landscape of perturbed domains, we expect to achieve generalization grounded on these flat minima for the unknown domains. Theoretically, we validate that merging SAM optimization with the UDIM objective establishes an upper bound for the true objective of the DG task. In an empirical aspect, UDIM consistently outperforms SAM variants across multiple DG benchmark datasets. Notably, UDIM shows statistically significant improvements in scenarios with more restrictive domain information, underscoring UDIM's generalization capability in unseen domains.
Unknown Domain Inconsistency Minimization for Domain Generalization
Seungjae Shin HeeSun Bae Byeonghu Na Yoon-Yeong Kim Il-chul Moon