# Domain Generalization by Marginal Transfer Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07910 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07910/

## Key facts

- Cited by 180 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 180)

- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03097/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [Towards Out-Of-Distribution Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13624/) (2021)
- [SWAD: Domain Generalization by Seeking Flat Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08604/) (2021)
- [Therapeutics Data Commons: Machine Learning Datasets and Tasks for Drug Discovery and Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09548/) (2021)
- [SelfReg: Self-supervised Contrastive Regularization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09841/) (2021)
- [Fishr: Invariant Gradient Variances for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02934/) (2021)
- [Causality Inspired Representation Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14237/) (2022)
- [Domain Generalization by Mutual-Information Regularization with Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10789/) (2022)
- [Model-Based Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11436/) (2021)
- [Sharpness-Aware Gradient Matching for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10353/) (2023)
- [OoD-Bench: Quantifying and Understanding Two Dimensions of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03721/) (2021)
- [Invariant Information Bottleneck for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06333/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Domain-Specific Features to Enhance Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09410/) (2021)
- [NICO++: Towards Better Benchmarking for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08040/) (2022)
- [Probable Domain Generalization via Quantile Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09944/) (2022)
- [Feed Two Birds with One Scone: Exploiting Wild Data for Both Out-of-Distribution Generalization and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09158/) (2023)
- [SAND-mask: An Enhanced Gradient Masking Strategy for the Discovery of Invariances in Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02266/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Domain Generalization for Face Anti-spoofing: Separability and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13662/) (2023)
- [AdaNPC: Exploring Non-Parametric Classifier for Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12566/) (2023)
- [Improved Test-Time Adaptation for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04494/) (2023)
- [Domain Adversarial Neural Networks for Domain Generalization: When It Works and How to Improve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03924/) (2021)
- [Out-of-distribution Generalization with Causal Invariant Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11528/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Vision-Language Models for Improving Domain Generalization in Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08255/) (2023)
- [Quantifying and Improving Transferability in Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03632/) (2021)
- [Self-Distilled Vision Transformer for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12392/) (2022)
- [Free Lunch for Domain Adversarial Training: Environment Label Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00194/) (2023)
- [Leveraging sparse and shared feature activations for disentangled representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07939/) (2023)
- [Grounding Visual Representations with Texts for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10285/) (2022)
- [Overcoming Simplicity Bias in Deep Networks using a Feature Sieve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13293/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the problem of domain generalization (DG), there are labeled training data sets from several related prediction problems, and the goal is to make accurate predictions on future unlabeled data sets that are not known to the learner. This problem arises in several applications where data distributions fluctuate because of environmental, technical, or other sources of variation. We introduce a formal framework for DG, and argue that it can be viewed as a kind of supervised learning problem by augmenting the original feature space with the marginal distribution of feature vectors. While our framework has several connections to conventional analysis of supervised learning algorithms, several unique aspects of DG require new methods of analysis. This work lays the learning theoretic foundations of domain generalization, building on our earlier conference paper where the problem of DG was introduced (Blanchard et al., 2011). We present two formal models of data generation, corresponding notions of risk, and distribution-free generalization error analysis. By focusing our attention on kernel methods, we also provide more quantitative results and a universally consistent algorithm. An efficient implementation is provided for this algorithm, which is experimentally compared to a pooling strategy on one synthetic and three real-world data sets.