# Gated Domain Units for Multi-source Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.12444 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12444/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 67 of its 127 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00687/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (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)
- [Multi-Task Learning as Multi-Objective Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04650/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [Deep Domain Confusion: Maximizing for Domain Invariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3474/) (2014)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.01332/) (2015)
- [Underspecification Presents Challenges for Credibility in Modern Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03395/) (2020)
- [Measuring Robustness to Natural Distribution Shifts in Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00644/) (2020)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Domain Generalization by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06864/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [Domain Generalisation via Imprecise Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04669/) (2024)
- [Integral Imprecise Probability Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16156/) (2025)
- [Multi-Stream Cellular Test-Time Adaptation of Real-Time Models Evolving in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17930/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The phenomenon of distribution shift (DS) occurs when a dataset at test time differs from the dataset at training time, which can significantly impair the performance of a machine learning model in practical settings due to a lack of knowledge about the data's distribution at test time. To address this problem, we postulate that real-world distributions are composed of latent Invariant Elementary Distributions (I.E.D) across different domains. This assumption implies an invariant structure in the solution space that enables knowledge transfer to unseen domains. To exploit this property for domain generalization, we introduce a modular neural network layer consisting of Gated Domain Units (GDUs) that learn a representation for each latent elementary distribution. During inference, a weighted ensemble of learning machines can be created by comparing new observations with the representations of each elementary distribution. Our flexible framework also accommodates scenarios where explicit domain information is not present. Extensive experiments on image, text, and graph data show consistent performance improvement on out-of-training target domains. These findings support the practicality of the I.E.D assumption and the effectiveness of GDUs for domain generalisation.