Domain Shift Research Articles

Consistency-Guided Temperature Scaling Using Style and Content Information for Out-of-Domain Calibration

Research interests in the robustness of deep neural networks against domain shifts have been rapidly increasing in recent years. Most existing works, however, focus on improving the accuracy of the model, not the calibration performance which is another important requirement for trustworthy AI systems. Temperature scaling (TS), an accuracy-preserving post-hoc calibration method, has been proven to be effective in in-domain settings, but not in out-of-domain (OOD) due to the difficulty in obtaining a validation set for the unseen domain beforehand. In this paper, we propose consistency-guided temperature scaling (CTS), a new temperature scaling strategy that can significantly enhance the OOD calibration performance by providing mutual supervision among data samples in the source domains. Motivated by our observation that over-confidence stemming from inconsistent sample predictions is the main obstacle to OOD calibration, we propose to guide the scaling process by taking consistencies into account in terms of two different aspects - style and content - which are the key components that can well-represent data samples in multi-domain settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed strategy outperforms existing works, achieving superior OOD calibration performance on various datasets. This can be accomplished by employing only the source domains without compromising accuracy, making our scheme directly applicable to various trustworthy AI systems.

Graph-Based Prediction and Planning Policy Network (GP3Net) for Scalable Self-Driving in Dynamic Environments Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Recent advancements in motion planning for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) show great promise in using expert driver behaviors in non-stationary driving environments. However, learning only through expert drivers needs more generalizability to recover from domain shifts and near-failure scenarios due to the dynamic behavior of traffic participants and weather conditions. A deep Graph-based Prediction and Planning Policy Network (GP3Net) framework is proposed for non-stationary environments that encodes the interactions between traffic participants with contextual information and provides a decision for safe maneuver for AV. A spatio-temporal graph models the interactions between traffic participants for predicting the future trajectories of those participants. The predicted trajectories are utilized to generate a future occupancy map around the AV with uncertainties embedded to anticipate the evolving non-stationary driving environments. Then the contextual information and future occupancy maps are input to the policy network of the GP3Net framework and trained using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. The proposed GP3Net performance is evaluated on standard CARLA benchmarking scenarios with domain shifts of traffic patterns (urban, highway, and mixed). The results show that the GP3Net outperforms previous state-of-the-art imitation learning-based planning models for different towns. Further, in unseen new weather conditions, GP3Net completes the desired route with fewer traffic infractions. Finally, the results emphasize the advantage of including the prediction module to enhance safety measures in non-stationary environments.

Towards Model Extraction Attacks in GAN-Based Image Translation via Domain Shift Mitigation

Model extraction attacks (MEAs) enable an attacker to replicate the functionality of a victim deep neural network (DNN) model by only querying its API service remotely, posing a severe threat to the security and integrity of pay-per-query DNN-based services. Although the majority of current research on MEAs has primarily concentrated on neural classifiers, there is a growing prevalence of image-to-image translation (I2IT) tasks in our everyday activities. However, techniques developed for MEA of DNN classifiers cannot be directly transferred to the case of I2IT, rendering the vulnerability of I2IT models to MEA attacks often underestimated. This paper unveils the threat of MEA in I2IT tasks from a new perspective. Diverging from the traditional approach of bridging the distribution gap between attacker queries and victim training samples, we opt to mitigate the effect caused by the different distributions, known as the domain shift. This is achieved by introducing a new regularization term that penalizes high-frequency noise, and seeking a flatter minimum to avoid overfitting to the shifted distribution. Extensive experiments on different image translation tasks, including image super-resolution and style transfer, are performed on different backbone victim models, and the new design consistently outperforms the baseline by a large margin across all metrics. A few real-life I2IT APIs are also verified to be extremely vulnerable to our attack, emphasizing the need for enhanced defenses and potentially revised API publishing policies.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptative Temporal Sentence Localization with Mutual Information Maximization

Temporal sentence localization (TSL) aims to localize a target segment in a video according to a given sentence query. Though respectable works have made decent achievements in this task, they severely rely on abundant yet expensive manual annotations for training. Moreover, these trained data-dependent models usually can not generalize well to unseen scenarios because of the inherent domain shift. To facilitate this issue, in this paper, we target another more practical but challenging setting: unsupervised domain adaptative temporal sentence localization (UDA-TSL), which explores whether the localization knowledge can be transferred from a fully-annotated data domain (source domain) to a new unannotated data domain (target domain). Particularly, we propose an effective and novel baseline for UDA-TSL to bridge the multi-modal gap across different domains and learn the potential correspondence between the video-query pairs in target domain. We first develop separate modality-specific domain adaptation modules to smoothly balance the minimization of the domain shifts in cross-dataset video and query domains. Then, to fully exploit the semantic correspondence of both modalities in target domain for unsupervised localization, we devise a mutual information learning module to adaptively align the video-query pairs which are more likely to be relevant in target domain, leading to more truly aligned target pairs and ensuring the discriminability of target features. In this way, our model can learn domain-invariant and semantic-aligned cross-modal representations. Three sets of migration experiments show that our model achieves competitive performance compared to existing methods.

AdvST: Revisiting Data Augmentations for Single Domain Generalization

Single domain generalization (SDG) aims to train a robust model against unknown target domain shifts using data from a single source domain. Data augmentation has been proven an effective approach to SDG. However, the utility of standard augmentations, such as translate, or invert, has not been fully exploited in SDG; practically, these augmentations are used as a part of a data preprocessing procedure. Although it is intuitive to use many such augmentations to boost the robustness of a model to out-of-distribution domain shifts, we lack a principled approach to harvest the benefit brought from multiple these augmentations. Here, we conceptualize standard data augmentations with learnable parameters as semantics transformations that can manipulate certain semantics of a sample, such as the geometry or color of an image. Then, we propose Adversarial learning with Semantics Transformations (AdvST) that augments the source domain data with semantics transformations and learns a robust model with the augmented data. We theoretically show that AdvST essentially optimizes a distributionally robust optimization objective defined on a set of semantics distributions induced by the parameters of semantics transformations. We demonstrate that AdvST can produce samples that expand the coverage on target domain data. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, AdvST, despite being a simple method, is surprisingly competitive and achieves the best average SDG performance on the Digits, PACS, and DomainNet datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/gtzheng/AdvST.

A Dynamic Learning Method towards Realistic Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

To tackle the challenge of recognizing images of unseen attribute-object compositions, Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) methods have been previously addressed. However, test images in realistic scenarios may also incorporate other forms of unknown factors, such as novel semantic concepts or novel image styles. As previous CZSL works have overlooked this critical issue, in this research, we first propose the Realistic Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (RCZSL) task which considers the various types of unknown factors in an unified experimental setting. To achieve this, we firstly conduct re-labelling on MIT-States and use the pre-trained generative models to obtain images of various domains. Then the entire dataset is split into a training set and a test set, with the latter containing images of unseen concepts, unseen compositions, unseen domains as well as their combinations. Following this, we show that the visual-semantic relationship changes on unseen images, leading us to construct two dynamic modulators to adapt the visual features and composition prototypes in accordance with the input image. We believe that such a dynamic learning method could effectively alleviate the domain shift problem caused by various types of unknown factors. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets for both the conventional CZSL setting and the proposed RCZSL setting. The effectiveness of our method has been proven by empirical results, which significantly outperformed both our baseline method and state-of-the-art approaches.

Towards Real-World Test-Time Adaptation: Tri-net Self-Training with Balanced Normalization

Test-Time Adaptation aims to adapt source domain model to testing data at inference stage with success demonstrated in adapting to unseen corruptions. However, these attempts may fail under more challenging real-world scenarios. Existing works mainly consider real-world test-time adaptation under non-i.i.d. data stream and continual domain shift. In this work, we first complement the existing real-world TTA protocol with a globally class imbalanced testing set. We demonstrate that combining all settings together poses new challenges to existing methods. We argue the failure of state-of-the-art methods is first caused by indiscriminately adapting normalization layers to imbalanced testing data. To remedy this shortcoming, we propose a balanced batchnorm layer to swap out the regular batchnorm at inference stage. The new batchnorm layer is capable of adapting without biasing towards majority classes. We are further inspired by the success of self-training (ST) in learning from unlabeled data and adapt ST for test-time adaptation. However, ST alone is prone to over adaption which is responsible for the poor performance under continual domain shift. Hence, we propose to improve self-training under continual domain shift by regularizing model updates with an anchored loss. The final TTA model, termed as TRIBE, is built upon a tri-net architecture with balanced batchnorm layers. We evaluate TRIBE on four datasets representing real-world TTA settings. TRIBE consistently achieves the state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation protocols. The code is available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/TRIBE.

Tools Identification By On-Board Adaptation of Vision-and-Language Models

A robotic workshop assistant has been a long-standing grand challenge for robotics, speech, computer vision, and artificial intelligence (AI) research. We revisit the goal of visual identification of tools from human queries in the current era of Large Vision-and-Language models (like GPT-4). We find that current off-the-shelf models (that are trained on internet images) are unable to overcome the domain shift and unable to identify small, obscure tools in cluttered environments. Furthermore, these models are unable to match tools to their intended purpose or affordances. We present a novel system for online domain adaptation that can be run directly on a small on-board processor. The system uses Hyperdimensional Computing (HD), a fast and efficient neuromorphic method. We adapted CLIP to work with explicit ("I need the hammer") and implicit purpose-driven queries ("Drive these nails"), and even with depth images as input. This demo allows the user to try out various real tools and interact via free-form audio.

DISCount: Counting in Large Image Collections with Detector-Based Importance Sampling

Many applications use computer vision to detect and count objects in massive image collections. However, automated methods may fail to deliver accurate counts, especially when the task is very difficult or requires a fast response time. For example, during disaster response, aid organizations aim to quickly count damaged buildings in satellite images to plan relief missions, but pre-trained building and damage detectors often perform poorly due to domain shifts. In such cases, there is a need for human-in-the-loop approaches to accurately count with minimal human effort. We propose DISCount -- a detector-based importance sampling framework for counting in large image collections. DISCount uses an imperfect detector and human screening to estimate low-variance unbiased counts. We propose techniques for counting over multiple spatial or temporal regions using a small amount of screening and estimate confidence intervals. This enables end-users to stop screening when estimates are sufficiently accurate, which is often the goal in real-world applications. We demonstrate our method with two applications: counting birds in radar imagery to understand responses to climate change, and counting damaged buildings in satellite imagery for damage assessment in regions struck by a natural disaster. On the technical side we develop variance reduction techniques based on control variates and prove the (conditional) unbiasedness of the estimators. DISCount leads to a 9-12x reduction in the labeling costs to obtain the same error rates compared to naive screening for tasks we consider, and surpasses alternative covariate-based screening approaches.

Detect Any Keypoints: An Efficient Light-Weight Few-Shot Keypoint Detector

Recently the prompt-based models have become popular across various language and vision tasks. Following that trend, we perform few-shot keypoint detection (FSKD) by detecting any keypoints in a query image, given the prompts formed by support images and keypoints. FSKD can be applied to detecting keypoints and poses of diverse animal species. In order to maintain flexibility of detecting varying number of keypoints, existing FSKD approaches modulate query feature map per support keypoint, then detect the corresponding keypoint from each modulated feature via a detection head. Such a separation of modulation-detection makes model heavy and slow when the number of keypoints increases. To overcome this issue, we design a novel light-weight detector which combines modulation and detection into one step, with the goal of reducing the computational cost without the drop of performance. Moreover, to bridge the large domain shift of keypoints between seen and unseen species, we further improve our model with mean feature based contrastive learning to align keypoint distributions, resulting in better keypoint representations for FSKD. Compared to the state of the art, our light-weight detector reduces the number of parameters by 50%, training/test time by 50%, and achieves 5.62% accuracy gain on 1-shot novel keypoint detection in the Animal pose dataset. Our model is also robust to the number of keypoints and saves memory when evaluating a large number of keypoints (e.g., 1000) per episode.

Adaptive Meta-Learning Probabilistic Inference Framework for Long Sequence Prediction

Long sequence prediction has broad and significant application value in fields such as finance, wind power, and weather. However, the complex long-term dependencies of long sequence data and the potential domain shift problems limit the effectiveness of traditional models in practical scenarios. To this end, we propose an Adaptive Meta-Learning Probabilistic Inference Framework (AMPIF) based on sequence decomposition, which can effectively enhance the long sequence prediction ability of various basic models. Specifically, first, we decouple complex sequences into seasonal and trend components through a frequency domain decomposition module. Then, we design an adaptive meta-learning task construction strategy, which divides the seasonal and trend components into different tasks through a clustering-matching approach. Finally, we design a dual-stream amortized network (ST-DAN) to capture shared information between seasonal-trend tasks and use the support set to generate task-specific parameters for rapid generalization learning on the query set. We conducted extensive experiments on six datasets, including wind power and finance scenarios, and the results show that our method significantly outperforms baseline methods in prediction accuracy, interpretability, and algorithm stability and can effectively enhance the long sequence prediction capabilities of base models. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zhu-JP/AMPIF.

Symmetric Self-Paced Learning for Domain Generalization

Deep learning methods often suffer performance degradation due to domain shift, where discrepancies exist between training and testing data distributions. Domain generalization mitigates this problem by leveraging information from multiple source domains to enhance model generalization capabilities for unseen domains. However, existing domain generalization methods typically present examples to the model in a random manner, overlooking the potential benefits of structured data presentation. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel learning strategy, Symmetric Self-Paced Learning (SSPL), for domain generalization. SSPL consists of a Symmetric Self-Paced training scheduler and a Gradient-based Difficulty Measure (GDM). Specifically, the proposed training scheduler initially focuses on easy examples, gradually shifting emphasis to harder examples as training progresses. GDM dynamically evaluates example difficulty through the gradient magnitude with respect to the example itself. Experiments across five popular benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed learning strategy.

Confusing Pair Correction Based on Category Prototype for Domain Adaptation under Noisy Environments

In this paper, we address unsupervised domain adaptation under noisy environments, which is more challenging and practical than traditional domain adaptation. In this scenario, the model is prone to overfitting noisy labels, resulting in a more pronounced domain shift and a notable decline in the overall model performance. Previous methods employed prototype methods for domain adaptation on robust feature spaces. However, these approaches struggle to effectively classify classes with similar features under noisy environments. To address this issue, we propose a new method to detect and correct confusing class pair. We first divide classes into easy and hard classes based on the small loss criterion. We then leverage the top-2 predictions for each sample after aligning the source and target domain to find the confusing pair in the hard classes. We apply label correction to the noisy samples within the confusing pair. With the proposed label correction method, we can train our model with more accurate labels. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our method and demonstrate its favorable performance compared with existing state-of-the-art methods. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Hehxcf/CPC/.

Mean Teacher DETR with Masked Feature Alignment: A Robust Domain Adaptive Detection Transformer Framework

Unsupervised domain adaptation object detection(UDAOD) research on Detection Transformer(DETR) mainly focuses on feature alignment and existing methods can be divided into two kinds, each of which has its unresolved issues. One-stage feature alignment methods can easily lead to performance fluctuation and training stagnation. Two-stage feature alignment method based on mean teacher comprises a pretraining stage followed by a self-training stage, each facing problems in obtaining reliable pretrained model and achieving consistent performance gains. Methods mentioned above have not yet explore how to utilize the third related domain such as target-like domain to assist adaptation. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage framework named MTM, i.e. Mean Teacher-DETR with Masked Feature Alignment. In the pretraining stage, we utilize labeled target-like images produced by image style transfer to avoid performance fluctuation. In the self-training stage, we leverage unlabeled target images by pseudo labels based on mean teacher and propose a module called Object Queries Knowledge Transfer(OQKT) to ensure consistent performance gains of the student model. Most importantly, we propose masked feature alignment methods including Masked Domain Query-based Feature Alignment(MDQFA) and Masked Token-wise Feature Alignment(MTWFA) to alleviate domain shift in a more robust way, which not only prevent training stagnation and lead to a robust pretrained model in the pretraining stage, but also enhance the model's target performance in the self-training stage. Experiments on three challenging scenarios and a theoretical analysis verify the effectiveness of MTM.

Exploring Sparse Visual Prompt for Domain Adaptive Dense Prediction

The visual prompts have provided an efficient manner in addressing visual cross-domain problems. Previous works introduce domain prompts to tackle the classification Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) problem by placing image-level prompts on the input and fine-tuning prompts for each target domain. However, since the image-level prompts mask out continuous spatial details in the prompt-allocated region, it will suffer from inaccurate contextual information and limited domain knowledge extraction, particularly when dealing with dense prediction TTA problems. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Sparse Visual Domain Prompts (SVDP) approach, which applies minimal trainable parameters (e.g., 0.1%) to pixels across the entire image and reserves more spatial information of the input. To better apply SVDP in extracting domain-specific knowledge, we introduce the Domain Prompt Placement (DPP) method to adaptively allocates trainable parameters of SVDP on the pixels with large distribution shifts. Furthermore, recognizing that each target domain sample exhibits a unique domain shift, we design Domain Prompt Updating (DPU) strategy to optimize prompt parameters differently for each sample, facilitating efficient adaptation to the target domain. Extensive experiments were conducted on widely-used TTA and continual TTA benchmarks, and our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both semantic segmentation and depth estimation tasks.

Generalizable Fourier Augmentation for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation

The performance of existing unsupervised video object segmentation methods typically suffers from severe performance degradation on test videos when tested in out-of-distribution scenarios. The primary reason is that the test data in real- world may not follow the independent and identically distribution (i.i.d.) assumption, leading to domain shift. In this paper, we propose a generalizable fourier augmentation method during training to improve the generalization ability of the model. To achieve this, we perform Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) over the intermediate spatial domain features in each layer to yield corresponding frequency representations, including amplitude components (encoding scene-aware styles such as texture, color, contrast of the scene) and phase components (encoding rich semantics). We produce a variety of style features via Gaussian sampling to augment the training data, thereby improving the generalization capability of the model. To further improve the cross-domain generalization performance of the model, we design a phase feature update strategy via exponential moving average using phase features from past frames in an online update manner, which could help the model to learn cross-domain-invariant features. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on popular benchmarks.

Multi-Source Collaborative Gradient Discrepancy Minimization for Federated Domain Generalization

Federated Domain Generalization aims to learn a domain-invariant model from multiple decentralized source domains for deployment on unseen target domain. Due to privacy concerns, the data from different source domains are kept isolated, which poses challenges in bridging the domain gap. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-source Collaborative Gradient Discrepancy Minimization (MCGDM) method for federated domain generalization. Specifically, we propose intra-domain gradient matching between the original images and augmented images to avoid overfitting the domain-specific information within isolated domains. Additionally, we propose inter-domain gradient matching with the collaboration of other domains, which can further reduce the domain shift across decentralized domains. Combining intra-domain and inter-domain gradient matching, our method enables the learned model to generalize well on unseen domains. Furthermore, our method can be extended to the federated domain adaptation task by fine-tuning the target model on the pseudo-labeled target domain. The extensive experiments on federated domain generalization and adaptation indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly.

Synergistic Anchored Contrastive Pre-training for Few-Shot Relation Extraction

Few-shot Relation Extraction (FSRE) aims to extract relational facts from a sparse set of labeled corpora. Recent studies have shown promising results in FSRE by employing Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) within the framework of supervised contrastive learning, which considers both instances and label facts. However, how to effectively harness massive instance-label pairs to encompass the learned representation with semantic richness in this learning paradigm is not fully explored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel synergistic anchored contrastive pre-training framework. This framework is motivated by the insight that the diverse viewpoints conveyed through instance-label pairs capture incomplete yet complementary intrinsic textual semantics. Specifically, our framework involves a symmetrical contrastive objective that encompasses both sentence-anchored and label-anchored contrastive losses. By combining these two losses, the model establishes a robust and uniform representation space. This space effectively captures the reciprocal alignment of feature distributions among instances and relational facts, simultaneously enhancing the maximization of mutual information across diverse perspectives within the same relation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves significant performance enhancements compared to baseline models in downstream FSRE tasks. Furthermore, our approach exhibits superior adaptability to handle the challenges of domain shift and zero-shot relation extraction. Our code is available online at https://github.com/AONE-NLP/FSRE-SaCon.

COMMA: Co-articulated Multi-Modal Learning

Pretrained large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP have demonstrated excellent generalizability over a series of downstream tasks. However, they are sensitive to the variation of input text prompts and need a selection of prompt templates to achieve satisfactory performance. Recently, various methods have been proposed to dynamically learn the prompts as the textual inputs to avoid the requirements of laboring hand-crafted prompt engineering in the fine-tuning process. We notice that these methods are suboptimal in two aspects. First, the prompts of the vision and language branches in these methods are usually separated or uni-directionally correlated. Thus, the prompts of both branches are not fully correlated and may not provide enough guidance to align the representations of both branches. Second, it's observed that most previous methods usually achieve better performance on seen classes but cause performance degeneration on unseen classes compared to CLIP. This is because the essential generic knowledge learned in the pretraining stage is partly forgotten in the fine-tuning process. In this paper, we propose Co-Articulated Multi-Modal Learning (COMMA) to handle the above limitations. Especially, our method considers prompts from both branches to generate the prompts to enhance the representation alignment of both branches. Besides, to alleviate forgetting about the essential knowledge, we minimize the feature discrepancy between the learned prompts and the embeddings of hand-crafted prompts in the pre-trained CLIP in the late transformer layers. We evaluate our method across three representative tasks of generalization to novel classes, new target datasets and unseen domain shifts. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method by exhibiting a favorable performance boost upon all tasks with high efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/hulianyuyy/COMMA.

Learning Generalized Medical Image Segmentation from Decoupled Feature Queries

Domain generalized medical image segmentation requires models to learn from multiple source domains and generalize well to arbitrary unseen target domain. Such a task is both technically challenging and clinically practical, due to the domain shift problem (i.e., images are collected from different hospitals and scanners). Existing methods focused on either learning shape-invariant representation or reaching consensus among the source domains. An ideal generalized representation is supposed to show similar pattern responses within the same channel for cross-domain images. However, to deal with the significant distribution discrepancy, the network tends to capture similar patterns by multiple channels, while different cross-domain patterns are also allowed to rest in the same channel. To address this issue, we propose to leverage channel-wise decoupled deep features as queries. With the aid of cross-attention mechanism, the long-range dependency between deep and shallow features can be fully mined via self-attention and then guides the learning of generalized representation. Besides, a relaxed deep whitening transformation is proposed to learn channel-wise decoupled features in a feasible way. The proposed decoupled fea- ture query (DFQ) scheme can be seamlessly integrate into the Transformer segmentation model in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments show its state-of-the-art performance, notably outperforming the runner-up by 1.31% and 1.98% with DSC metric on generalized fundus and prostate benchmarks, respectively. Source code is available at https://github.com/BiQiWHU/DFQ.