Improving Diversity with Adversarially Learned Transformations for Domain Generalization

To be successful in single source domain generalization (SSDG), maximizing diversity of synthesized domains has emerged as one of the most effective strategies. Recent success in SSDG comes from methods that pre-specify diversity inducing image augmentations during training, so that it may lead to better generalization on new domains. However, naïve pre-specified augmentations are not always effective, either because they cannot model large domain shift, or be-cause the specific choice of transforms may not cover the types of shift commonly occurring in domain generalization. To address this issue, we present a novel framework called ALT: adversarially learned transformations, that uses an adversary neural network to model plausible, yet hard image transformations that fool the classifier. ALT learns image transformations by randomly initializing the adversary net-work for each batch and optimizing it for a fixed number of steps to maximize classification error. The classifier is trained by enforcing a consistency between its predictions on the clean and transformed images. With extensive empirical analysis, we find that this new form of adversarial transformations achieves both objectives of diversity and hardness simultaneously, outperforming all existing techniques on competitive benchmarks for SSDG. We also show that ALT can seamlessly work with existing diversity modules to produce highly distinct, and large transformations of the source domain leading to state-of-the-art performance. Code: https://github.com/tejas-gokhale/ALT