# Bridge: Basis-Driven Causal Inference Marries VFMs for Domain Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26820 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26820/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (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)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer of Robotic Control with Dynamics Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06537/) (2017)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [A Fourier-based Framework for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11120/) (2021)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [Domain Randomization and Pyramid Consistency: Simulation-to-Real Generalization without Accessing Target Domain Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00889/) (2019)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detectors often suffer from degraded performance, primarily due to the distributional gap between the source and target domains. This issue is especially evident in single-source domains with limited data, as models tend to rely on confounders (e.g., illumination, co-occurrence, and style) from the source domain, leading to spurious correlations that hinder generalization. To this end, this paper proposes a novel Basis-driven framework for domain generalization, namely textbftextitBridge, that incorporates causal inference into object detection. By learning the low-rank bases for front-door adjustment, textbftextitBridge blocks confounders' effects to mitigate spurious correlations, while simultaneously refining representations by filtering redundant and task-irrelevant components. textbftextitBridge can be seamlessly integrated with both discriminative (e.g., DINOv2/3, SAM) and generative (e.g., Stable Diffusion) Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). Extensive experiments across multiple domain generalization object detection datasets, i.e., Cross-Camera, Adverse Weather, Real-to-Artistic, Diverse Weather Datasets, and Diverse Weather DroneVehicle (our newly augmented real-world UAV-based benchmark), underscore the superiority of our proposed method over previous state-of-the-art approaches. The project page is available at: https://mingbohong.github.io/Bridge/.