# AADG: Automatic Augmentation for Domain Generalization on Retinal Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13249/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03097/) (2021)
- [Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09940/) (2016)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains via Adversarial Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12018/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization via Model-Agnostic Learning of Semantic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13580/) (2019)
- [Unified Deep Supervised Domain Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10190/) (2017)
- [Learning to Generate Novel Domains for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03304/) (2020)
- [FedDG: Federated Domain Generalization on Medical Image Segmentation via Episodic Learning in Continuous Frequency Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06030/) (2021)
- [Fast AutoAugment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00397/) (2019)
- [REFUGE Challenge: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Automated Methods for Glaucoma Assessment from Fundus Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03667/) (2019)
- [CE-Net: Context Encoder Network for 2D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02740/) (2019)
- [Learning Data Augmentation Strategies for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11172/) (2019)
- [Data augmentation using learned transformations for one-shot medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09383/) (2019)
- [Improving GANs Using Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05573/) (2018)
- [Adversarial AutoAugment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11188/) (2019)
- [Domain Agnostic Learning with Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12347/) (2019)
- [A Kernel Theory of Modern Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06084/) (2018)
- [Learning to Compose Domain-Specific Transformations for Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01643/) (2017)
- [Adversarially Adaptive Normalization for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01899/) (2021)
- [ROSE: A Retinal OCT-Angiography Vessel Segmentation Dataset and New Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05201/) (2020)
- [Maximum Density Divergence for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12615/) (2020)
- [Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation Based on Multi-label Deep Network and Polar Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00926/) (2018)
- [DoFE: Domain-oriented Feature Embedding for Generalizable Fundus Image Segmentation on Unseen Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06208/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Domain Generalization for Medical Image Analysis: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08598/) (2023)
- [Towards Generalizable Diabetic Retinopathy Grading in Unseen Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04378/) (2023)
- [FairDomain: Achieving Fairness in Cross-Domain Medical Image Segmentation and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08813/) (2024)
- [Mamba-Sea: A Mamba-based Framework with Global-to-Local Sequence Augmentation for Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17515/) (2025)
- [The Devil is in the Statistics: Mitigating and Exploiting Statistics Difference for Generalizable Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11356/) (2024)
- [MedAugment: Universal Automatic Data Augmentation Plug-in for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17466/) (2023)
- [Segmenting Medical Images with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09189/) (2024)
- [S2S2: Semantic Stacking for Robust Semantic Segmentation in Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13156/) (2024)
- [DGSSA: Domain generalization with structural and stylistic augmentation for retinal vessel segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03466/) (2025)
- [Prototypical Progressive Alignment and Reweighting for Generalizable Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11955/) (2025)
- [Curvilinear Structure-preserving Unpaired Cross-domain Medical Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19679/) (2025)
- [A General Model for Retinal Segmentation and Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07012/) (2026)
- [Generalizability of Deep Adult Lung Segmentation Models to the Pediatric Population: A Retrospective Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02475/) (2022)
- [JOINEDTrans: Prior Guided Multi-task Transformer for Joint Optic Disc/Cup Segmentation and Fovea Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11504/) (2023)
- [VesselMorph: Domain-Generalized Retinal Vessel Segmentation via Shape-Aware Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00240/) (2023)
- [Semantic Data Augmentation Enhanced Invariant Risk Minimization for Medical Image Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05593/) (2025)
- [AdvBlur: Adversarial Blur for Robust Diabetic Retinopathy Classification and Cross-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24000/) (2025)
- [Cross-Domain Vessel Segmentation via Latent Similarity Mining and Iterative Co-Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01553/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional neural networks have been widely applied to medical image segmentation and have achieved considerable performance. However, the performance may be significantly affected by the domain gap between training data (source domain) and testing data (target domain). To address this issue, we propose a data manipulation based domain generalization method, called Automated Augmentation for Domain Generalization (AADG). Our AADG framework can effectively sample data augmentation policies that generate novel domains and diversify the training set from an appropriate search space. Specifically, we introduce a novel proxy task maximizing the diversity among multiple augmented novel domains as measured by the Sinkhorn distance in a unit sphere space, making automated augmentation tractable. Adversarial training and deep reinforcement learning are employed to efficiently search the objectives. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on 11 publicly-accessible fundus image datasets (four for retinal vessel segmentation, four for optic disc and cup (OD/OC) segmentation and three for retinal lesion segmentation) are comprehensively performed. Two OCTA datasets for retinal vasculature segmentation are further involved to validate cross-modality generalization. Our proposed AADG exhibits state-of-the-art generalization performance and outperforms existing approaches by considerable margins on retinal vessel, OD/OC and lesion segmentation tasks. The learned policies are empirically validated to be model-agnostic and can transfer well to other models. The source code is available at https://github.com/CRazorback/AADG.