# Preserving Silent Features for Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03170 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03170/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [On Large-Batch Training for Deep Learning: Generalization Gap and Sharp Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04836/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Continual Test-Time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13591/) (2022)
- [Using Self-Supervised Learning Can Improve Model Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12340/) (2019)
- [Domain Generalization by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06864/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain generalization (DG) aims to improve the generalization ability of the model trained on several known training domains over unseen test domains. Previous work has shown that self-supervised contrastive pre-training improves the robustness of the model on downstream tasks. However, in this paper, we find that self-supervised models do not exhibit better generalization performance than supervised models pre-trained on the same dataset in the DG setting. We argue that this is owing to the fact that the richer intra-class discriminative features extracted by self-supervised contrastive learning, which we term silent features, are suppressed during supervised fine-tuning. These silent features are likely to contain features that are more generalizable on the test domain. In this work, we model and analyze this feature suppression phenomenon and theoretically prove that preserving silent features can achieve lower expected test domain risk under certain conditions. In light of this, we propose a simple yet effective method termed STEP (Silent Feature Preservation) to improve the generalization performance of the self-supervised contrastive learning pre-trained model by alleviating the suppression of silent features during the supervised fine-tuning process. Experimental results show that STEP exhibits state-of-the-art performance on standard DG benchmarks with significant distribution shifts.