# ALOFT: A Lightweight MLP-like Architecture with Dynamic Low-frequency Transform for Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11674 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11674/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains via Adversarial Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12018/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06864/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Pay Attention to MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08050/) (2021)
- [ResMLP: Feedforward networks for image classification with data-efficient training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03404/) (2021)
- [How Do Vision Transformers Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06709/) (2022)
- [Learning to Generate Novel Domains for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03304/) (2020)
- [A Fourier-based Framework for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11120/) (2021)
- [Global Filter Networks for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00645/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Fourier Neural Operators: Efficient Token Mixers for Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13587/) (2021)
- [Deep Domain-Adversarial Image Generation for Domain Generalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06054/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization using Causal Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07500/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Domain Generalization Using a Mixture of Multiple Latent Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07661/) (2019)
- [Learning to Diversify for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11726/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Ensemble Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07325/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Generalizable Decision Boundaries: Dualistic Meta-Learning for Open Set Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09391/) (2023)
- [DomainDrop: Suppressing Domain-Sensitive Channels for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10285/) (2023)
- [DomainAdaptor: A Novel Approach to Test-time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10297/) (2023)
- [MLP Can Be A Good Transformer Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05657/) (2024)
- [Learn to Preserve and Diversify: Parameter-Efficient Group with Orthogonal Regularization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15085/) (2024)
- [DATR: Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Detection Transformer with Dataset-Level Adaptation and Prototypical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11765/) (2024)
- [Advancing Open-Set Domain Generalization Using Evidential Bi-Level Hardest Domain Scheduler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17555/) (2024)
- [MoreStyle: Relax Low-frequency Constraint of Fourier-based Image Reconstruction in Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11689/) (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)
- [Reasoning-Driven Multimodal LLM for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23777/) (2026)
- [Mitigating Label Noise using Prompt-Based Hyperbolic Meta-Learning in Open-Set Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18342/) (2024)
- [Learning Generalizable Models via Disentangling Spurious and Enhancing Potential Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05752/) (2024)
- [Balanced Direction from Multifarious Choices: Arithmetic Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18987/) (2025)
- [MGT-Prism: Enhancing Domain Generalization for Machine-Generated Text Detection via Spectral Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13768/) (2025)
- [Exploring Flat Minima for Domain Generalization with Large Learning Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06337/) (2023)
- [START: A Generalized State Space Model with Saliency-Driven Token-Aware Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16020/) (2024)
- [SETA: Semantic-Aware Token Augmentation for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11792/) (2024)
- [DG-DETR: Toward Domain Generalized Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19574/) (2025)
- [Style-Adaptive Detection Transformer for Single-Source Domain Generalized Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20498/) (2025)
- [Attention Head Purification: A New Perspective to Harness CLIP for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07226/) (2024)
- [EReLiFM: Evidential Reliability-Aware Residual Flow Meta-Learning for Open-Set Domain Generalization under Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12687/) (2025)
- [CPCANet: Deep Unfolding Common Principal Component Analysis for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05136/) (2026)
- [Patch-aware Batch Normalization for Improving Cross-domain Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02848/) (2023)
- [Generative Classifier for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02272/) (2025)
- [PSScreen V2: Partially Supervised Multiple Retinal Disease Screening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22589/) (2025)
- [FreqGRL: Suppressing Low-Frequency Bias and Mining High-Frequency Knowledge for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06648/) (2025)
- [Attention Is not Everything: Efficient Alternatives for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17439/) (2026)
- [StableMind: Source-Free Cross-Subject fMRI Decoding with Regularized Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02586/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain generalization (DG) aims to learn a model that generalizes well to unseen target domains utilizing multiple source domains without re-training. Most existing DG works are based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, the local operation of the convolution kernel makes the model focus too much on local representations (e.g., texture), which inherently causes the model more prone to overfit to the source domains and hampers its generalization ability. Recently, several MLP-based methods have achieved promising results in supervised learning tasks by learning global interactions among different patches of the image. Inspired by this, in this paper, we first analyze the difference between CNN and MLP methods in DG and find that MLP methods exhibit a better generalization ability because they can better capture the global representations (e.g., structure) than CNN methods. Then, based on a recent lightweight MLP method, we obtain a strong baseline that outperforms most state-of-the-art CNN-based methods. The baseline can learn global structure representations with a filter to suppress structure irrelevant information in the frequency space. Moreover, we propose a dynAmic LOw-Frequency spectrum Transform (ALOFT) that can perturb local texture features while preserving global structure features, thus enabling the filter to remove structure-irrelevant information sufficiently. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks have demonstrated that our method can achieve great performance improvement with a small number of parameters compared to SOTA CNN-based DG methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/lingeringlight/ALOFT/.