# Causal Balancing for Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.05263 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05263/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00670/) (2016)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [In Search of Lost Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01434/) (2020)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00688/) (2020)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)
- [Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.01332/) (2015)
- [Just Train Twice: Improving Group Robustness without Training Group Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09044/) (2021)
- [Variational Autoencoders and Nonlinear ICA: A Unifying Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04809/) (2019)
- [Self-Challenging Improves Cross-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02454/) (2020)
- [Unified Deep Supervised Domain Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10190/) (2017)
- [The Risks of Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05761/) (2020)
- [Gradient Matching for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09937/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization for Object Recognition with Multi-task Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07680/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Domain Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01805/) (2019)
- [Domain Generalization using Causal Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07500/) (2020)
- [Invariance Principle Meets Information Bottleneck for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06607/) (2021)
- [D'ya like DAGs? A Survey on Structure Learning and Causal Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02582/) (2021)
- [SelfReg: Self-supervised Contrastive Regularization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09841/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Flatness-Aware Minimization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11108/) (2023)
- [A Causal Adjustment Module for Debiasing Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17862/) (2025)
- [Causal reasoning in typical computer vision tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13992/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Misalignment in Vision-Language Model Adaptation from a Causal Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12816/) (2024)
- [HCVP: Leveraging Hierarchical Contrastive Visual Prompt for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09716/) (2024)
- [Learning Generalizable Models via Disentangling Spurious and Enhancing Potential Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05752/) (2024)
- [Towards Identifiable Latent Additive Noise Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15711/) (2024)
- [Scalable Out-of-distribution Robustness in the Presence of Unobserved Confounders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19923/) (2024)
- [Gradient Extrapolation for Debiased Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13236/) (2025)
- [How Does Distribution Matching Help Domain Generalization: An Information-theoretic Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09745/) (2024)
- [Subgroups Matter for Robust Bias Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21363/) (2025)
- [Superclass-Guided Representation Disentanglement for Spurious Correlation Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08570/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Spurious Correlation in Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11517/) (2024)
- [DICS: Find Domain-Invariant and Class-Specific Features for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08557/) (2024)
- [A Reverse Causal Framework to Mitigate Spurious Correlations for Debiasing Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23451/) (2025)
- [Direct-Effect Risk Minimization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14594/) (2022)
- [Invariant Correlation of Representation with Label: Enhancing Domain Generalization in Noisy Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01749/) (2024)
- [A Causal Framework for Mitigating Data Shifts in Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13595/) (2026)
- [How Many Samples Are Enough for Learning Across Domains?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39336/) (2026)
- [Can Domain Generalization be Guaranteed in Small-Sample Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39512/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While machine learning models rapidly advance the state-of-the-art on various real-world tasks, out-of-domain (OOD) generalization remains a challenging problem given the vulnerability of these models to spurious correlations. We propose a balanced mini-batch sampling strategy to transform a biased data distribution into a spurious-free balanced distribution, based on the invariance of the underlying causal mechanisms for the data generation process. We argue that the Bayes optimal classifiers trained on such balanced distribution are minimax optimal across a diverse enough environment space. We also provide an identifiability guarantee of the latent variable model of the proposed data generation process, when utilizing enough train environments. Experiments are conducted on DomainBed, demonstrating empirically that our method obtains the best performance across 20 baselines reported on the benchmark.