# Self-Challenging Improves Cross-Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.02454 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02454/

## Key facts

- Cited by 426 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 426)

- [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)
- [A Fourier-based Framework for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11120/) (2021)
- [FedDG: Federated Domain Generalization on Medical Image Segmentation via Episodic Learning in Continuous Frequency Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06030/) (2021)
- [Gradient Matching for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09937/) (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)
- [Learning to Diversify for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11726/) (2021)
- [Deep Stable Learning for Out-Of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07876/) (2021)
- [Ensemble of Averages: Improving Model Selection and Boosting Performance in Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10832/) (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)
- [Uncertainty Modeling for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03958/) (2022)
- [Causality-inspired Single-source Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12525/) (2021)
- [Learning Debiased Representation via Disentangled Feature Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01372/) (2021)
- [Open Domain Generalization with Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03620/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Adversarially Adaptive Normalization for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01899/) (2021)
- [GLUE-X: Evaluating Natural Language Understanding Models from an Out-of-distribution Generalization Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08073/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Style Augmentation for Domain Generalized Urban-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04892/) (2022)
- [FedCLIP: Fast Generalization and Personalization for CLIP in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13485/) (2023)
- [Probable Domain Generalization via Quantile Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09944/) (2022)
- [Attention-Challenging Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07125/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) conduct image classification by activating dominant features that correlated with labels. When the training and testing data are under similar distributions, their dominant features are similar, which usually facilitates decent performance on the testing data. The performance is nonetheless unmet when tested on samples from different distributions, leading to the challenges in cross-domain image classification. We introduce a simple training heuristic, Representation Self-Challenging (RSC), that significantly improves the generalization of CNN to the out-of-domain data. RSC iteratively challenges (discards) the dominant features activated on the training data, and forces the network to activate remaining features that correlates with labels. This process appears to activate feature representations applicable to out-of-domain data without prior knowledge of new domain and without learning extra network parameters. We present theoretical properties and conditions of RSC for improving cross-domain generalization. The experiments endorse the simple, effective and architecture-agnostic nature of our RSC method.