Domain Generalization via Discrete Codebook Learning

Abstract: Domain generalization (DG) strives to address distribution shifts across diverse environments to enhance model's generalizability. Current DG approaches are confined to acquiring robust representations with continuous features, specifically training at the pixel level. However, this DG paradigm may struggle to mitigate distribution gaps in dealing with a large space of continuous features, rendering it susceptible to pixel details that exhibit spurious correlations or noise. In this paper, we first theoretically demonstrate that the domain gaps in continuous representation learning can be reduced by the discretization process. Based on this inspiring finding, we introduce a novel learning paradigm for DG, termed Discrete Domain Generalization (DDG). DDG proposes to use a codebook to quantize the feature map into discrete codewords, aligning semantic-equivalent information in a shared discrete representation space that prioritizes semantic-level information over pixel-level intricacies. By learning at the semantic level, DDG diminishes the number of latent features, optimizing the utilization of the representation space and alleviating the risks associated with the wide-ranging space of continuous features. Extensive experiments across widely employed benchmarks in DG demonstrate DDG's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches, underscoring its potential to reduce the distribution gaps and enhance the model's generalizability.