# Rethinking Domain Adaptation and Generalization in the Era of CLIP

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15173 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15173/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07511/) (2022)
- [Prompt Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03340/) (2022)
- [CDTrans: Cross-domain Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06165/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptation via Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06687/) (2022)
- [Task Residual for Tuning Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10277/) (2022)
- [DualCoOp: Fast Adaptation to Multi-Label Recognition with Limited Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09541/) (2022)
- [TVT: Transferable Vision Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05988/) (2021)
- [A Broad Study of Pre-training for Domain Generalization and Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11819/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [CLIP-Powered Domain Generalization and Domain Adaptation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14280/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection with Dual-Branch Prompt Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00777/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Performance of Explainable AI Models with Constrained Concept Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06775/) (2025)
- [Domain-Invariant Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28555/) (2026)
- [SHED: Style-Homogenized Embedding Alignment for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16973/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent studies on domain adaptation, significant emphasis has been placed on the advancement of learning shared knowledge from a source domain to a target domain. Recently, the large vision-language pre-trained model, i.e., CLIP has shown strong ability on zero-shot recognition, and parameter efficient tuning can further improve its performance on specific tasks. This work demonstrates that a simple domain prior boosts CLIP's zero-shot recognition in a specific domain. Besides, CLIP's adaptation relies less on source domain data due to its diverse pre-training dataset. Furthermore, we create a benchmark for zero-shot adaptation and pseudo-labeling based self-training with CLIP. Last but not least, we propose to improve the task generalization ability of CLIP from multiple unlabeled domains, which is a more practical and unique scenario. We believe our findings motivate a rethinking of domain adaptation benchmarks and the associated role of related algorithms in the era of CLIP.