# LatentDR: Improving Model Generalization Through Sample-Aware Latent Degradation and Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14596 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14596/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [The Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04056/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Balanced Meta-Softmax for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10740/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [What's in a Latent? Leveraging Diffusion Latent Space for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06698/) (2025)
- [Generalizable autoregressive modeling of time series through functional narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08421/) (2024)
- [Shoe Style-Invariant and Ground-Aware Learning for Dense Foot Contact Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22184/) (2025)
- [Invariant Correlation of Representation with Label: Enhancing Domain Generalization in Noisy Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01749/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite significant advances in deep learning, models often struggle to generalize well to new, unseen domains, especially when training data is limited. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach for distribution-aware latent augmentation that leverages the relationships across samples to guide the augmentation procedure. Our approach first degrades the samples stochastically in the latent space, mapping them to augmented labels, and then restores the samples from their corrupted versions during training. This process confuses the classifier in the degradation step and restores the overall class distribution of the original samples, promoting diverse intra-class/cross-domain variability. We extensively evaluate our approach on a diverse set of datasets and tasks, including domain generalization benchmarks and medical imaging datasets with strong domain shift, where we show our approach achieves significant improvements over existing methods for latent space augmentation. We further show that our method can be flexibly adapted to long-tail recognition tasks, demonstrating its versatility in building more generalizable models. Code is available at https://github.com/nerdslab/LatentDR.