# Gradient-Guided Annealing for Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20162/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 72 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01412/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Averaging Weights Leads to Wider Optima and Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05407/) (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)
- [InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03657/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08114/) (2017)
- [GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02257/) (2017)
- [Multi-Task Learning as Multi-Objective Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04650/) (2018)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03097/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04136/) (2020)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00688/) (2020)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Reasoning-Driven Multimodal LLM for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23777/) (2026)
- [Noise-Aware Generalization: Robustness to In-Domain Noise and Out-of-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02996/) (2025)
- [Higher-Order Domain Generalization in Magnetic Resonance-Based Assessment of Alzheimer's Disease](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01485/) (2026)
- [Preserving Domain Generalization in Fine-Tuning via Joint Parameter Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16976/) (2025)
- [DSP-Reg: Domain-Sensitive Parameter Regularization for Robust Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19394/) (2026)
- [Flatness and Gradient Alignment Are Both Necessary: Spectral-Aware Gradient-Aligned Exploration for Multi-Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07914/) (2026)
- [Towards Truly Multilingual ASR: Generalizing Code-Switching ASR to Unseen Language Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05846/) (2026)
- [Learning Subset-Shared Invariances for Domain Generalization with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25665/) (2026)
- [PAPT++: Risk-Aware Adversarial Tuning and Generation for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04837/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain Generalization (DG) research has gained considerable traction as of late, since the ability to generalize to unseen data distributions is a requirement that eludes even state-of-the-art training algorithms. In this paper we observe that the initial iterations of model training play a key role in domain generalization effectiveness, since the loss landscape may be significantly different across the training and test distributions, contrary to the case of i.i.d. data. Conflicts between gradients of the loss components of each domain lead the optimization procedure to undesirable local minima that do not capture the domain-invariant features of the target classes. We propose alleviating domain conflicts in model optimization, by iteratively annealing the parameters of a model in the early stages of training and searching for points where gradients align between domains. By discovering a set of parameter values where gradients are updated towards the same direction for each data distribution present in the training set, the proposed Gradient-Guided Annealing (GGA) algorithm encourages models to seek out minima that exhibit improved robustness against domain shifts. The efficacy of GGA is evaluated on five widely accepted and challenging image classification domain generalization benchmarks, where its use alone is able to establish highly competitive or even state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, when combined with previously proposed domain-generalization algorithms it is able to consistently improve their effectiveness by significant margins.