Harmonizing and Merging Source Models for CLIP-based Domain Generalization

Abstract: CLIP-based domain generalization aims to improve model generalization to unseen domains by leveraging the powerful zero-shot classification capabilities of CLIP and multiple source datasets. Existing methods typically train a single model across multiple source domains to capture domain-shared information. However, this paradigm inherently suffers from two types of conflicts: 1) sample conflicts, arising from noisy samples and extreme domain shifts among sources; and 2) optimization conflicts, stemming from competition and trade-offs during multi-source training. Both hinder the generalization and lead to suboptimal solutions. Recent studies have shown that model merging can effectively mitigate the competition of multi-objective optimization and improve generalization performance. Inspired by these findings, we propose Harmonizing and Merging (HAM), a novel source model merging framework for CLIP-based domain generalization. During the training process of the source models, HAM enriches the source samples without conflicting samples, and harmonizes the update directions of all models. Then, a redundancy-aware historical model merging method is introduced to effectively integrate knowledge across all source models. HAM comprehensively consolidates source domain information while enabling mutual enhancement among source models, ultimately yielding a final model with optimal generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments on five widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance.