Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32 (NeurIPS 2019)
Qi Dou, Daniel Coelho de Castro, Konstantinos Kamnitsas, Ben Glocker
Generalization capability to unseen domains is crucial for machine learning models when deploying to real-world conditions. We investigate the challenging problem of domain generalization, i.e., training a model on multi-domain source data such that it can directly generalize to target domains with unknown statistics. We adopt a model-agnostic learning paradigm with gradient-based meta-train and meta-test procedures to expose the optimization to domain shift. Further, we introduce two complementary losses which explicitly regularize the semantic structure of the feature space. Globally, we align a derived soft confusion matrix to preserve general knowledge of inter-class relationships. Locally, we promote domain-independent class-specific cohesion and separation of sample features with a metric-learning component. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated with new state-of-the-art results on two common object recognition benchmarks. Our method also shows consistent improvement on a medical image segmentation task.