# Moderately Distributional Exploration for Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13976 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13976/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [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 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)
- [Adversarial Training for Free!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12843/) (2019)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [One pixel attack for fooling deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08864/) (2017)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06864/) (2019)
- [Towards Out-Of-Distribution Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13624/) (2021)
- [Self-Challenging Improves Cross-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02454/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization via Model-Agnostic Learning of Semantic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13580/) (2019)
- [Certifying Some Distributional Robustness with Principled Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10571/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Generalizing Across Domains via Cross-Gradient Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10745/) (2018)
- [Gradient Matching for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09937/) (2021)
- [Episodic Training for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00113/) (2019)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Learning to Augment Distributions for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01796/) (2023)
- [SRCD: Semantic Reasoning with Compound Domains for Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01750/) (2023)
- [HYPO: Hyperspherical Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07785/) (2024)
- [Meta OOD Learning for Continuously Adaptive OOD Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11705/) (2023)
- [Out-of-Distribution Learning with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07772/) (2024)
- [Generalizable Prompt Learning of CLIP: A Brief Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01263/) (2025)
- [RoME: Domain-Robust Mixture-of-Experts for MILP Solution Prediction across Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02331/) (2025)
- [Generative Classifier for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02272/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain generalization (DG) aims to tackle the distribution shift between training domains and unknown target domains. Generating new domains is one of the most effective approaches, yet its performance gain depends on the distribution discrepancy between the generated and target domains. Distributionally robust optimization is promising to tackle distribution discrepancy by exploring domains in an uncertainty set. However, the uncertainty set may be overwhelmingly large, leading to low-confidence prediction in DG. It is because a large uncertainty set could introduce domains containing semantically different factors from training domains. To address this issue, we propose to perform a moderately distributional exploration (MODE) for domain generalization. Specifically, MODE performs distribution exploration in an uncertainty textitsubset that shares the same semantic factors with the training domains. We show that MODE can endow models with provable generalization performance on unknown target domains. The experimental results show that MODE achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
