# Reducing Spurious Correlation for Federated Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.19174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19174/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Tackling the Objective Inconsistency Problem in Heterogeneous Federated Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07481/) (2020)
- [Model-Contrastive Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16257/) (2021)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Data Silos: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02079/) (2021)
- [Self-Challenging Improves Cross-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02454/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization via Model-Agnostic Learning of Semantic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13580/) (2019)
- [A Fourier-based Framework for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11120/) (2021)
- [FedDG: Federated Domain Generalization on Medical Image Segmentation via Episodic Learning in Continuous Frequency Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06030/) (2021)
- [Gradient Matching for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09937/) (2021)
- [Federated Continual Learning with Weighted Inter-client Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03196/) (2020)
- [Generalized Federated Learning via Sharpness Aware Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02618/) (2022)
- [Learning from Extrinsic and Intrinsic Supervisions for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09316/) (2020)
- [HarmoFL: Harmonizing Local and Global Drifts in Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10775/) (2021)
- [What Do We Mean by Generalization in Federated Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14216/) (2021)
- [When is invariance useful in an Out-of-Distribution Generalization problem ?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01883/) (2020)
- [Style Normalization and Restitution for Domain Generalization and Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00588/) (2021)
- [Federated Domain Generalization for Image Recognition via Cross-Client Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00912/) (2022)
- [FedFM: Anchor-based Feature Matching for Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07615/) (2022)
- [Multi-view Adversarial Discriminator: Mine the Non-causal Factors for Object Detection in Unseen Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02950/) (2023)
- [Feature Distribution Matching for Federated Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11635/) (2022)
- [Improving Weakly-supervised Object Localization via Causal Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10351/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Language Anchor-Guided Method for Robust Noisy Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17211/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid development of multimedia has provided a large amount of data with different distributions for visual tasks, forming different domains. Federated Learning (FL) can efficiently use this diverse data distributed on different client media in a decentralized manner through model sharing. However, in open-world scenarios, there is a challenge: global models may struggle to predict well on entirely new domain data captured by certain media, which were not encountered during training. Existing methods still rely on strong statistical correlations between samples and labels to address this issue, which can be misleading, as some features may establish spurious short-cut correlations with the predictions. To comprehensively address this challenge, we introduce FedCD (Cross-Domain Invariant Federated Learning), an overall optimization framework at both the local and global levels. We introduce the Spurious Correlation Intervener (SCI), which employs invariance theory to locally generate interventers for features in a self-supervised manner to reduce the model's susceptibility to spurious correlated features. Our approach requires no sharing of data or features, only the gradients related to the model. Additionally, we develop the simple yet effective Risk Extrapolation Aggregation strategy (REA), determining aggregation coefficients through mathematical optimization to facilitate global causal invariant predictions. Extensive experiments and ablation studies highlight the effectiveness of our approach. In both classification and object detection generalization tasks, our method outperforms the baselines by an average of at least 1.45% in Acc, 4.8% and 1.27% in mAP50.