Domain generalization via causal fine-grained feature decomposition and learning

Abstract

Domain generalization aims to accurately predict unknown data using models trained by known domain data. Learning domain-invariant representations based on causal inference is one of the popular directions in domain generalization. However, existing domain generalization models based on causal inference cannot correctly determine the invariance conditions of the data. It is because of the interdependent relationship between domain-invariant features and confounding factors that ultimately leads to difficulty in obtaining truly invariant representations by the model. In this paper, we propose a novel domain generalization method called causal fine-grained feature decomposition and learning (CFFDL), which aims to eliminate latent confounding factors and learn causal domain-invariant representations in image classification tasks. Specifically, we design a feature decomposition module based on mutual information, which can decompose deep features into fine-grained feature factors and achieve factor independence between different dimensions, thereby helping to eliminate confounding factors. Furthermore, we introduce a causal representations learning module that can effectively filter and extract relevant causal features of the prediction task while eliminating the influence of confounding factors, improving the model’s performance on domain generalization. Extensive experiments on three domain generalization datasets VLCS, PACS and Office-Home show that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art models, proving its effectiveness and superiority on domain generalization tasks of image classification.