Domain adversarial neural networks for domain generalization: when it works and how to improve

Abstract

Theoretically, domain adaptation is a well-researched problem. Further, this theory has been well-used in practice. In particular, we note the bound on target error given by Ben-David et al. (Mach Learn 79(1–2):151–175, 2010) and the well-known domain-aligning algorithm based on this work using Domain Adversarial Neural Networks (DANN) presented by Ganin and Lempitsky (in International conference on machine learning, pp 1180–1189). Recently, multiple variants of DANN have been proposed for the related problem of domain generalization, but without much discussion of the original motivating bound. In this paper, we investigate the validity of DANN in domain generalization from this perspective. We investigate conditions under which application of DANN makes sense and further consider DANN as a dynamic process during training. Our investigation suggests that the application of DANN to domain generalization may not be as straightforward as it seems. To address this, we design an algorithmic extension to DANN in the domain generalization case. Our experimentation validates both theory and algorithm.