# Disentangling Masked Autoencoders for Unsupervised Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07544 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07544/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [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)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [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)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (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)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03097/) (2021)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00688/) (2020)
- [Context Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03026/) (2022)
- [Generalizing Across Domains via Cross-Gradient Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10745/) (2018)
- [Invariance Principle Meets Information Bottleneck for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06607/) (2021)
- [Fishr: Invariant Gradient Variances for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02934/) (2021)
- [Improve Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Mixup Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00677/) (2020)
- [FSDR: Frequency Space Domain Randomization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02370/) (2021)
- [On Calibration and Out-of-domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10395/) (2021)
- [AdaRNN: Adaptive Learning and Forecasting of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04443/) (2021)
- [Toward Understanding the Feature Learning Process of Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15134/) (2021)
- [Open Domain Generalization with Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03620/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Dynamic Adapter with Semantics Disentangling for Cross-lingual Cross-modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13510/) (2024)
- [Minimal Semantic Sufficiency Meets Unsupervised Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15791/) (2025)
- [MeDUET: Disentangled Unified Pretraining for 3D Medical Image Synthesis and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17901/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain Generalization (DG), designed to enhance out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, is all about learning invariance against domain shifts utilizing sufficient supervision signals. Yet, the scarcity of such labeled data has led to the rise of unsupervised domain generalization (UDG) - a more important yet challenging task in that models are trained across diverse domains in an unsupervised manner and eventually tested on unseen domains. UDG is fast gaining attention but is still far from well-studied. To close the research gap, we propose a novel learning framework designed for UDG, termed the Disentangled Masked Auto Encoder (DisMAE), aiming to discover the disentangled representations that faithfully reveal the intrinsic features and superficial variations without access to the class label. At its core is the distillation of domain-invariant semantic features, which cannot be distinguished by domain classifier, while filtering out the domain-specific variations (for example, color schemes and texture patterns) that are unstable and redundant. Notably, DisMAE co-trains the asymmetric dual-branch architecture with semantic and lightweight variation encoders, offering dynamic data manipulation and representation level augmentation capabilities. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets (i.e., DomainNet, PACS, VLCS, Colored MNIST) with both DG and UDG tasks demonstrate that DisMAE can achieve competitive OOD performance compared with the state-of-the-art DG and UDG baselines, which shed light on potential research line in improving the generalization ability with large-scale unlabeled data.