# DomainDrop: Suppressing Domain-Sensitive Channels for Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10285 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10285/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2901/) (2013)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Domain Generalization via Model-Agnostic Learning of Semantic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13580/) (2019)
- [A Fourier-based Framework for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11120/) (2021)
- [DropBlock: A regularization method for convolutional networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12890/) (2018)
- [Global Filter Networks for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00645/) (2021)
- [Gradient Matching for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09937/) (2021)
- [Deep Domain-Adversarial Image Generation for Domain Generalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06054/) (2020)
- [Efficient Object Localization Using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4280/) (2014)
- [Domain Generalization using Causal Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07500/) (2020)
- [R-Drop: Regularized Dropout for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14448/) (2021)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Federated Learning for Generalization, Robustness, Fairness: A Survey and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06750/) (2023)
- [DGMamba: Domain Generalization via Generalized State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07794/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Domain Generalization: Discriminability and Generalizability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16483/) (2023)
- [PracticalDG: Perturbation Distillation on Vision-Language Models for Hybrid Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09011/) (2024)
- [CLIP-Powered Domain Generalization and Domain Adaptation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14280/) (2025)
- [Learn to Preserve and Diversify: Parameter-Efficient Group with Orthogonal Regularization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15085/) (2024)
- [Prompt Disentanglement via Language Guidance and Representation Alignment for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02288/) (2025)
- [Reasoning-Driven Multimodal LLM for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23777/) (2026)
- [RobustEMD: Domain Robust Matching for Cross-domain Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01110/) (2024)
- [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)
- [START: A Generalized State Space Model with Saliency-Driven Token-Aware Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16020/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Domain Prompt Tuning and Generation for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21736/) (2026)
- [SETA: Semantic-Aware Token Augmentation for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11792/) (2024)
- [ED-SAM: An Efficient Diffusion Sampling Approach to Domain Generalization in Vision-Language Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01432/) (2024)
- [Exploring Scale Shift in Crowd Localization under the Context of Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19330/) (2025)
- [PARDON: Privacy-Aware and Robust Federated Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22622/) (2024)
- [Beyond Overfitting: Doubly Adaptive Dropout for Generalizable AU Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08974/) (2025)
- [Multi-Source Collaborative Style Augmentation and Domain-Invariant Learning for Federated Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10152/) (2025)
- [DSP-Reg: Domain-Sensitive Parameter Regularization for Robust Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19394/) (2026)
- [Domain Generalization via Text-Anchored Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01657/) (2026)
- [PAPT++: Risk-Aware Adversarial Tuning and Generation for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04837/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep Neural Networks have exhibited considerable success in various visual tasks. However, when applied to unseen test datasets, state-of-the-art models often suffer performance degradation due to domain shifts. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for domain generalization from a novel perspective of enhancing the robustness of channels in feature maps to domain shifts. We observe that models trained on source domains contain a substantial number of channels that exhibit unstable activations across different domains, which are inclined to capture domain-specific features and behave abnormally when exposed to unseen target domains. To address the issue, we propose a DomainDrop framework to continuously enhance the channel robustness to domain shifts, where a domain discriminator is used to identify and drop unstable channels in feature maps of each network layer during forward propagation. We theoretically prove that our framework could effectively lower the generalization bound. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks indicate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other competing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/lingeringlight/DomainDrop.