# Gradient Estimation for Unseen Domain Risk Minimization with Pre-Trained Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.01497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [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)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01903/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [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)
- [SWAD: Domain Generalization by Seeking Flat Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08604/) (2021)
- [Self-Challenging Improves Cross-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02454/) (2020)
- [Learning to Learn Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13216/) (2020)
- [Gradient Matching for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09937/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Domain Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01805/) (2019)
- [SelfReg: Self-supervised Contrastive Regularization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09841/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Fast-Slow Test-Time Adaptation for Online Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13209/) (2023)
- [Learn to Preserve and Diversify: Parameter-Efficient Group with Orthogonal Regularization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15085/) (2024)
- [Domain Generalization Using Large Pretrained Models with Mixture-of-Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11031/) (2023)
- [Prompt Disentanglement via Language Guidance and Representation Alignment for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02288/) (2025)
- [Generalizing vision-language models to novel domains: A comprehensive survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18504/) (2025)
- [Memory-Integrated Reconfigurable Adapters: A Unified Framework for Settings with Multiple Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00940/) (2025)
- [Attention Head Purification: A New Perspective to Harness CLIP for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07226/) (2024)
- [Preserving Domain Generalization in Fine-Tuning via Joint Parameter Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16976/) (2025)
- [Domain Generalization via Text-Anchored Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01657/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain generalization aims to build generalized models that perform well on unseen domains when only source domains are available for model optimization. Recent studies have shown that large-scale pre-trained models can enhance domain generalization by leveraging their generalization power. However, these pre-trained models lack target task-specific knowledge yet due to discrepancies between the pre-training objectives and the target task. Although the task-specific knowledge could be learned from source domains by fine-tuning, this hurts the generalization power of pre-trained models due to gradient bias toward the source domains. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new domain generalization method that estimates unobservable gradients that reduce potential risks in unseen domains using a large-scale pre-trained model. These estimated unobservable gradients allow the pre-trained model to learn task-specific knowledge further while preserving its generalization ability by relieving the gradient bias. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms baseline methods on DomainBed, a standard benchmark in domain generalization. We also provide extensive analyses to demonstrate that the pre-trained model can learn task-specific knowledge without sacrificing its generalization power.