Advancing Open-Set Domain Generalization Using Evidential Bi-Level Hardest Domain Scheduler

In Open-Set Domain Generalization (OSDG), the model is exposed to both new variations of data appearance (domains) and open-set conditions, where both known and novel categories are present at test time. The challenges of this task arise from the dual need to generalize across diverse domains and accurately quantify category novelty, which is critical for applications in dynamic environments. Recently, meta-learning techniques have demonstrated superior results in OSDG, effectively orchestrating the meta-train and -test tasks by employing varied random categories and predefined domain partition strategies. These approaches prioritize a well-designed training schedule over traditional methods that focus primarily on data augmentation and the enhancement of discriminative feature learning. The prevailing meta-learning models in OSDG typically utilize a predefined sequential domain scheduler to structure data partitions. However, a crucial aspect that remains inadequately explored is the influence brought by strategies of domain schedulers during training. In this paper, we observe that an adaptive domain scheduler benefits more in OSDG compared with prefixed sequential and random domain schedulers. We propose the Evidential Bi-Level Hardest Domain Scheduler (EBiL-HaDS) to achieve an adaptive domain scheduler. This method strategically sequences domains by assessing their reliabilities in utilizing a follower network, trained with confidence scores learned in an evidential manner, regularized by max rebiasing discrepancy, and optimized in a bi-level manner. The results show that our method substantially improves OSDG performance and achieves more discriminative embeddings for both the seen and unseen categories. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/KPeng9510/EBiL-HaDS.

Paper

Similar papers

Peer review

Reviewer tsHR5/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-07

Summary

In this paper, the authors identify a new problem in open-set domain generalization, proposing that dynamically adapting the domain scheduler used for data partitioning based on specific criteria could lead to a more targeted training strategy and improved outcomes. They introduce a novel training strategy named the Evidential Bi-Level Hardest Domain Scheduler (EBiL-HaDS), which combines max rebiased discrepancy evidential learning with meta-learning to create an adaptive domain scheduler.

Strengths

1. The authors focus on a new and interesting problem that dynamically adapt the domain scheduler used for data partition may improve open-set domain generalization performance. 2. Extensive experiments verify the efficiency of the proposed adaptive domain scheduler.

Weaknesses

1. The motivation for considering the training order of domains is unclear. I believe that if there were temporal correlation between domains, considering the training order would be reasonable. However, in this research setting and the datasets used in the experiments, there is no temporal correlation. Therefore, why should the training order be considered? 2. In my opinion, this paper primarily makes some improvements to the MEDIC model. However, compared to MEDIC, the proposed method does not show significant performance improvement on some tasks. 3. Dynamically adapting the domain scheduler used for data partitioning based on certain criteria can be seen as a trick rather than a major contribution. 4. The key idea of EBiL-HaDS is to quantify domain reliability. I suggest that the authors provide a more detailed definition of domain reliability and demonstrate that domain reliability is existing in real-world scenarios with a significant impact on generalization. 5. What is the motivation for applying max rebiased discrepancy evidential learning to achieve more reliable confidence acquisition? Are there any particular advantages to this approach? The authors should compare this approach with other similar techniques. 6. There are still some grammatical mistakes and typos in this paper. Please proofread the paper carefully.

Questions

Discussed in the weaknesses.

Rating

5

Confidence

3

Soundness

2

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

Yes.

Reviewer euSj5/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-10

Summary

The paper addresses the challenges of Open-Set Domain Generalization (OSDG) and introduces the Evidential Bi-Level Hardest Domain Scheduler (EBiL-HaDS), which adaptively sequences domains based on their reliability, assessed through a follower network. The authors verify EBiL-HaDS on three benchmarks: PACS, DigitsDG, and OfficeHome, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in OSDG.

Strengths

1. EBiL-HaDS dynamically adjusts the domain training sequence, which is a novel idea compared to the fixed schedulers used in previous works. 2. Comprehensive experiments and ablations on PACS, DigitsDG, and OfficeHome demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach 3. The paper is very well written and easy to follow

Weaknesses

1. The proposed framework is too complex and hard to reproduce. The source code is also not provided. 2. The authors only use CNN backbones. More ablations on ViT backbone should be added, as it demonstrates strong domain generalization performances compared with CNN [A, B] [A] Li et al., Sparse Mixture-of-Experts are Domain Generalizable Learners, ICLR 2023 [B] Zheng et al., Prompt Vision Transformer for Domain Generalization, arxiv 2022

Questions

What is the performance under ViT architecture?

Rating

5

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

The authors discuss the limitation of potential leading to misclassification and biased content, potentially causing false predictions.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

To Reviewer euSj

Dear Reviewer euSj, Thank you very much for your comments and your contribution to the review procedure. The authors would like to ask if you have any question on the rebuttal, since the discussion period between the authors and the reviewers will end soon. We provided the source code link and the additional 24 ablation experiments on ViT-Base according to your instruction in the rebuttal. Please let us know if you have any further questions. Thank you. Best, The authors.

Reviewer euSj2024-08-12

Thank the authors for their rebuttal. Most of my concerns have been well-addressed and I thus increased my score to 5.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

To Reviewer euSj

Dear Reviewer euSj, Thank you very much for your response and decision, the authors are very glad to hear your decision. We will include all the experiments and source code link in our final version. Thank you. Best, The authors

Reviewer QWTs5/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-12

Summary

In this paper, an observation is proposed, that an adaptive domain scheduler benefits more in OSDG compared with prefixed sequential and random domain schedulers. A follower network is proposed to strategically sequences domains by assessing their reliabilities, which is trained with confidence scores learned in an evidential manner and optimized in a bi-level manner. Experiments show the superior OSDG performance and ability to get more discriminative embeddings for both the seen and unseen categories.

Strengths

1. The paper is well-written. 2. The influence of domain scheduling in the OSDG task remains unexplored. This paper examines the effects of guiding the meta-learning process with an adaptive domain scheduler. A domain reliability measure method is proposed by an follower network. 3. The proposed method conducts comprehensive and discriminative data partitions during training, enhancing generalization to unseen domains. 4. Experiments on OSDG tasks show the superior performance.

Weaknesses

The experiments conducted only on ResNet50 ResNet18 and ConvNet. The number of parameters in those backbone are limited. If the comparison is conducted on models with a large number of parameters, like ResNet152 or ViT-based models, would the advantage in classification performance be leveled off?

Questions

If the comparison is conducted on models with a large number of parameters, like ResNet152 or ViT-based models, would the advantage in classification performance be leveled off?

Rating

5

Confidence

3

Soundness

2

Presentation

2

Contribution

2

Limitations

The experiments only conducted on classification tasks.

Reviewer DFZJ7/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-18

Summary

The paper presents an adaptive domain scheduler with ability to adjust the training order dynamically according to model’s current performance and domain difficulty to address OSDG, short for Open-Set Domain Generalization (OSDG), task where the model is exposed to domain shift and category shift.

Strengths

1. Effectiveness of addressing limitation of current study. The paper focus on OSDG task and pointed out the problem of existing meta-learning-based OSDG approaches that they didn’t consider influence that the order where domains are presented brings to the process of model generalization. To address this major shortness, the author proposed a novel training strategy named EBiL-HaDS which emphasis the influence of training order and can adjust the order of domain presentation dynamically and automatically. 2. Abundance of references. The research and experiment is based on abundant and various related work. Summary of existing work especially about domain generalization and open-set recognition is abundant and enough to support his research. With accurate overview and clear awareness of critical shortness of existing study, the paper is revolutionary and meaningful in addressing major problem. 3. Sufficient and reliable Experiment. The paper conducted several experiments on extensive datasets ,all of which showed dramatically improvement. This showed effectiveness of the proposed method.

Weaknesses

1. Several mistakes in format such as missing indent before paragraphs and size of pictures, and the formula in between line 161 and line 162. 2. No open resource code and data. Inconvenience to reproduce and follow the experiment. Also unable to exam the effectiveness of the result.

Questions

1. Citation in line 91、93 and so on, citation order is not standard. 2. Line 331~474, The reference format is incorrect, citation of journals needs to be marked with issues, pages and years

Rating

7

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

Experiments show that the method proposed in this paper may still lead to misclassification and biased content. This may cause useless even false predication , causing critical negative influence in popularizing. Additionally, EBiL-HaDS is significantly relied on source domains with unified categories and its using scene is strictly limited, it has only been tested on image classification tasks.

Reviewer DFZJ2024-08-08

To Author

I can't find the url of the code, and if the code is available, I would like to increase my score.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-08

Question to AC regarding the url code link and response to the reviewer

Dear Reviewer DFZJ, dear AC, @Reviewer DFZJ, Thank you for your fast response and we are very glad to hear that you will increase your score. Thank you for the effort of review. We will ask the AC to make the code available to the reviewers. @AC, could you please make the source code link we submitted in the official comment to AC available to the reviewers? Thank you. According to the rebuttal instruction we have provided the anonymous link of code in the official message to the AC, where the reviewers are not chosen as readers. Thank you for your help. Best regards, The authors.

Reviewer DFZJ2024-08-08

To author

Thank you, I would like to increase my score to 7, and I look forward to the author's future work on DG.

Area Chair MwKT2024-08-09

Anonymous code

Dear reviewers, I have checked the anonymity of the source code, which is okay for me. The anonymous GitHub link provided by the authors is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EBiL-HaDS-623E. Best

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

To Reviewer QWTs

Dear Reviewer QWTs, Thank you for your effort during the review procedure. Since the author-reviewer discussion will be end soon, the authors would like to ask if you have any questions on the rebuttal. We have provided 48 experiments to build the benchmarks on ViT-base and ResNet152 backbone to illustrate the efficacy of our proposed method according to your question. Thank you. Best, The authors.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

To Reviewer tsHR

Dear Reviewer tsHR, Thank you very much for your review effort and questions. The authors would like to ask if you have any further questions on the rebuttal reply, since the author reviewer discussion period will end soon. The point-to-point response of each question in the weakness part is provided in the rebuttal response. In case there is anything unclear please feel free to let us know. Thank you. Best, The authors.

Reviewer tsHR2024-08-12

Thanks for the authors' detailed response and additional experiments. I will increase the score to 5.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

To Reviewer tsHR

Dear Reviewer tsHR, Thank you for your fast feedback. The authors are pleased with your decision and will conduct all your suggested modifications in the final version. Best, The authors.

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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