Simulate, Refocus and Ensemble: An Attention-Refocusing Scheme for Domain GeneralizationZiyi Wang, Zhi Gao, Jin Chen et al.
Domain generalization (DG) aims to learn a model from source domains and apply it to unseen target domains with out-of-distribution data. Owing to CLIP's strong ability to encode semantic concepts, it has attracted increasing interest in domain generalization. However, CLIP often struggles to focus on task-relevant regions across domains, i.e., domain-invariant regions, resulting in suboptimal performance on unseen target domains. To address this challenge, we propose an attention-refocusing scheme, called Simulate, Refocus and Ensemble (SRE), which learns to reduce the domain shift by aligning the attention maps in CLIP via attention refocusing. SRE first simulates domain shifts by performing augmentation on the source data to generate simulated target domains. SRE then learns to reduce the domain shifts by refocusing the attention in CLIP between the source and simulated target domains. Finally, SRE utilizes ensemble learning to enhance the ability to capture domain-invariant attention maps between the source data and the simulated target data. Extensive experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that SRE generally achieves better results than state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/bitPrincy/SRE-DG.
3.6CVMay 30, 2025
VUDG: A Dataset for Video Understanding Domain GeneralizationZiyi Wang, Zhi Gao, Boxuan Yu et al.
Video understanding has made remarkable progress in recent years, largely driven by advances in deep models and the availability of large-scale annotated datasets. However, existing works typically ignore the inherent domain shifts encountered in real-world video applications, leaving domain generalization (DG) in video understanding underexplored. Hence, we propose Video Understanding Domain Generalization (VUDG), a novel dataset designed specifically for evaluating the DG performance in video understanding. VUDG contains videos from 11 distinct domains that cover three types of domain shifts, and maintains semantic similarity across different domains to ensure fair and meaningful evaluation. We propose a multi-expert progressive annotation framework to annotate each video with both multiple-choice and open-ended question-answer pairs. Extensive experiments on 9 representative large video-language models (LVLMs) and several traditional video question answering methods show that most models (including state-of-the-art LVLMs) suffer performance degradation under domain shifts. These results highlight the challenges posed by VUDG and the difference in the robustness of current models to data distribution shifts. We believe VUDG provides a valuable resource for prompting future research in domain generalization video understanding.