Papers › Domain Generalization using Causal Matching
Domain Generalization using Causal Matching
Divyat Mahajan, Shruti Tople, Amit Sharma
In the domain generalization literature, a common objective is to learn representations independent of the domain after conditioning on the class label. We show that this objective is not sufficient: there exist counter-examples where a model fails to generalize to unseen domains even after satisfying class-conditional domain invariance. We formalize this observation through a structural causal model and show the importance of modeling within-class variations for generalization. Specifically, classes contain objects that characterize specific causal features, and domains can be interpreted as interventions on these objects that change non-causal features. We highlight an alternative condition: inputs across domains should have the same representation if they are derived from the same object. Based on this objective, we propose matching-based algorithms when base objects are observed (e.g., through data augmentation) and approximate the objective when objects are not observed (MatchDG). Our simple matching-based algorithms are competitive to prior work on out-of-domain accuracy for rotated MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, PACS, and Chest-Xray datasets. Our method MatchDG also recovers ground-truth object matches: on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, top-10 matches from MatchDG have over 50% overlap with ground-truth matches.
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Code
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Domain Generalization | PACS | MDG-Hybrid (ResNet-50) | Average Accuracy | 87.52 | #37 of 133 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Domain Generalization | PACS | MDG-Hybrid (Resnet-18) | Average Accuracy | 84.35 | #62 of 133 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Domain Generalization | Rotated Fashion-MNIST | MatchDG | Accuracy | 82.8 | #1 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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