# CAMO: Causality-Guided Adversarial Multimodal Domain Generalization for Crisis Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08071 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08071/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Balanced Multimodal Learning via On-the-fly Gradient Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15332/) (2022)
- [Causality Inspired Representation Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14237/) (2022)
- [CrisisMMD: Multimodal Twitter Datasets from Natural Disasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00713/) (2018)
- [SimMMDG: A Simple and Effective Framework for Multi-modal Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19795/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Categorization of Crisis Events in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04917/) (2020)
- [Causality Guided Disentanglement for Cross-Platform Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02080/) (2023)
- [Bridging Domain Generalization to Multimodal Domain Generalization via Unified Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03304/) (2025)
- [Domain Generalization via Causal Adjustment for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14536/) (2024)

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

- [Large Language Models for Causal Relations Extraction in Social Media: A Validation Framework for Disaster Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11348/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Crisis classification in social media aims to extract actionable disaster-related information from multimodal posts, which is a crucial task for enhancing situational awareness and facilitating timely emergency responses. However, the wide variation in crisis types makes achieving generalizable performance across unseen disasters a persistent challenge. Existing approaches primarily leverage deep learning to fuse textual and visual cues for crisis classification, achieving numerically plausible results under in-domain settings. However, they exhibit poor generalization across unseen crisis types because they 1. do not disentangle spurious and causal features, resulting in performance degradation under domain shift, and 2. fail to align heterogeneous modality representations within a shared space, which hinders the direct adaptation of established single-modality domain generalization (DG) techniques to the multimodal setting. To address these issues, we introduce a causality-guided multimodal domain generalization (MMDG) framework that combines adversarial disentanglement with unified representation learning for crisis classification. The adversarial objective encourages the model to disentangle and focus on domain-invariant causal features, leading to more generalizable classifications grounded in stable causal mechanisms. The unified representation aligns features from different modalities within a shared latent space, enabling single-modality DG strategies to be seamlessly extended to multimodal learning. Experiments on the different datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves the best performance in unseen disaster scenarios.