# Switchable Whitening for Deep Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09739 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09739/

## Key facts

- Cited by 106 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 106)

- [RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15597/) (2021)
- [Style-Hallucinated Dual Consistency Learning for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02548/) (2022)
- [CLIP the Gap: A Single Domain Generalization Approach for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05499/) (2023)
- [Stronger, Fewer, & Superior: Harnessing Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04265/) (2023)
- [Semantic-Aware Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00822/) (2022)
- [WildNet: Learning Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation from the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01446/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Style Augmentation for Domain Generalized Urban-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04892/) (2022)
- [Global and Local Texture Randomization for Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02376/) (2021)
- [Test-time Batch Statistics Calibration for Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04065/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Domain Generalized Stereo Matching Networks from a Feature Consistency Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10887/) (2022)
- [Instance-Aware Domain Generalization for Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05640/) (2023)
- [Progressive Random Convolutions for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00424/) (2023)
- [Collaborating Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09788/) (2023)
- [HGFormer: Hierarchical Grouping Transformer for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13031/) (2023)
- [Learning Content-enhanced Mask Transformer for Domain Generalized Urban-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00371/) (2023)
- [Improving Single Domain-Generalized Object Detection: A Focus on Diversification and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14497/) (2024)
- [Unbiased Faster R-CNN for Single-source Domain Generalized Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15225/) (2024)
- [SRCD: Semantic Reasoning with Compound Domains for Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01750/) (2023)
- [Generalization by Adaptation: Diffusion-Based Domain Extension for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01850/) (2023)
- [Texture Learning Domain Randomization for Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11546/) (2023)
- [Prompt-Driven Dynamic Object-Centric Learning for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18447/) (2024)
- [Mamba as a Bridge: Where Vision Foundation Models Meet Vision Language Models for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03193/) (2025)
- [Style-Hallucinated Dual Consistency Learning: A Unified Framework for Visual Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09068/) (2022)
- [Learning Spectral-Decomposed Tokens for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18568/) (2024)
- [Cross-Domain Ensemble Distillation for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14058/) (2022)
- [Object-Aware Domain Generalization for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12133/) (2023)
- [Textual Query-Driven Mask Transformer for Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09033/) (2024)
- [Domain Generalization via Balancing Training Difficulty and Model Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00844/) (2023)
- [Strong but simple: A Baseline for Domain Generalized Dense Perception by CLIP-based Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02021/) (2023)
- [Robust Differentiable SVD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03821/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Normalization methods are essential components in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). They either standardize or whiten data using statistics estimated in predefined sets of pixels. Unlike existing works that design normalization techniques for specific tasks, we propose Switchable Whitening (SW), which provides a general form unifying different whitening methods as well as standardization methods. SW learns to switch among these operations in an end-to-end manner. It has several advantages. First, SW adaptively selects appropriate whitening or standardization statistics for different tasks (see Fig.1), making it well suited for a wide range of tasks without manual design. Second, by integrating benefits of different normalizers, SW shows consistent improvements over its counterparts in various challenging benchmarks. Third, SW serves as a useful tool for understanding the characteristics of whitening and standardization techniques. We show that SW outperforms other alternatives on image classification (CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet), semantic segmentation (ADE20K, Cityscapes), domain adaptation (GTA5, Cityscapes), and image style transfer (COCO). For example, without bells and whistles, we achieve state-of-the-art performance with 45.33% mIoU on the ADE20K dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/XingangPan/Switchable-Whitening.