Domain Generalization Under Posterior Drift

Abstract

Domain generalization (DG) is the problem of generalizing from several distributions (or domains), for which labeled training data are available, to a new test domain for which no labeled data is available. For the prevailing benchmark datasets in DG, there exists a single classifier that performs well across all domains. In this work, we study a fundamentally different regime where the domains satisfy a \emph{posterior drift} assumption, in which the optimal classifier might vary substantially with domain. We establish a decision-theoretic framework for DG under posterior drift, and investigate the practical implications of this framework through experiments on language and vision tasks.