Single domain generalization via unsupervised diversity probe

Single domain generalization (SDG) is a realistic yet challenging domain generalization scenario that aims to generalize a model trained on a single domain to multiple unseen domains. Typical SDG methods are essentially supervised data augmentation strategies, which tend to enhance the novelty rather than the diversity of augmented samples. Insufficient diversity may jeopardize the model generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial method, termed Unsupervised Diversity Probe (UDP), to synthesize novel and diverse samples in fully unsupervised settings. More specifically, to ensure that samples are novel, we study SDG from an information-theoretic perspective that minimizes the uncertainty coefficients between synthesized and source samples. Considering that the variation in a single source domain is limited, we introduce a regularization imposed on the auxiliary module that synthesizes variable samples, incorporated with uncertainty coefficients in an adversarial manner to complement the diversity. Subsequently, an available region is utilized to guarantee the samples’ safety. For the network architecture, we design a simple probe module that can synthesize samples in several different aspects. UDP is an unsupervised and easy-to-implement method that solves SDG using only synthetic (source) samples, thus reducing the dependence on task models. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that UDP achieves remarkable results and outperforms existing supervised and unsupervised methods by a large margin in single domain generalization. Source code is available: https://github.com/Ruiding1/Diversity_Probe.