# PracticalDG: Perturbation Distillation on Vision-Language Models for Hybrid Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09011 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09011/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 51 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/prompt-learning-and-adaptation-of-clip/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01903/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [Less is More: ClipBERT for Video-and-Language Learning via Sparse Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06183/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [CLIP2Video: Mastering Video-Text Retrieval via Image CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11097/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Reciprocal Points Learning for Open Set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00953/) (2021)
- [Regularizing Class-wise Predictions via Self-knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13964/) (2020)
- [Causality Inspired Representation Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14237/) (2022)
- [Domain Generalization by Mutual-Information Regularization with Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10789/) (2022)
- [Cross-Image Relational Knowledge Distillation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06986/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection and Beyond in Vision Language Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21794/) (2024)
- [Advances in Multimodal Adaptation and Generalization: From Traditional Approaches to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18592/) (2025)
- [CLIP-Powered Domain Generalization and Domain Adaptation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14280/) (2025)
- [QT-DoG: Quantization-aware Training for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06020/) (2024)
- [Generalizing vision-language models to novel domains: A comprehensive survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18504/) (2025)
- [OSLoPrompt: Bridging Low-Supervision Challenges and Open-Set Domain Generalization in CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16106/) (2025)
- [Evaluating and Improving Robustness in Large Language Models: A Survey and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11111/) (2025)
- [Generalizable Multispectral Land Cover Classification via Frequency-Aware Mixture of Low-Rank Token Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14088/) (2025)
- [Data-Efficient Generalization for Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05204/) (2025)
- [GBlobs: Explicit Local Structure via Gaussian Blobs for Improved Cross-Domain LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08639/) (2025)
- [Generalizing Vision-Language Models with Dedicated Prompt Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02421/) (2025)
- [Fake or Real, Can Robots Tell? Evaluating VLM Robustness to Domain Shift in Single-View Robotic Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19579/) (2025)
- [Advancing Vision-based Human Action Recognition: Exploring Vision-Language CLIP Model for Generalisation in Domain-Independent Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18675/) (2025)
- [SemAlign: Language Guided Semi-supervised Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11724/) (2026)
- [CRUISE: Vision-Language Model-Guided Uncertainty-Aware Cross-Modal Sensor Fusion for Robust Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09202/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain Generalization (DG) aims to resolve distribution shifts between source and target domains, and current DG methods are default to the setting that data from source and target domains share identical categories. Nevertheless, there exists unseen classes from target domains in practical scenarios. To address this issue, Open Set Domain Generalization (OSDG) has emerged and several methods have been exclusively proposed. However, most existing methods adopt complex architectures with slight improvement compared with DG methods. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have been introduced in DG following the fine-tuning paradigm, but consume huge training overhead with large vision models. Therefore, in this paper, we innovate to transfer knowledge from VLMs to lightweight vision models and improve the robustness by introducing Perturbation Distillation (PD) from three perspectives, including Score, Class and Instance (SCI), named SCI-PD. Moreover, previous methods are oriented by the benchmarks with identical and fixed splits, ignoring the divergence between source domains. These methods are revealed to suffer from sharp performance decay with our proposed new benchmark Hybrid Domain Generalization (HDG) and a novel metric H2-CV, which construct various splits to comprehensively assess the robustness of algorithms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on multiple datasets, especially improving the robustness when confronting data scarcity.