SemAlign: Language Guided Semi-supervised Domain Generalization
This work addresses domain generalization with limited labeled data, which is an incremental improvement for computer vision applications.
The paper tackles the problem of semi-supervised domain generalization by proposing a method that aligns model features with a vision language model to improve domain-invariance, achieving state-of-the-art results across four benchmarks.
Semi-supervised Domain Generalization (SSDG) addresses the challenge of generalizing to unseen target domains with limited labeled data. Existing SSDG methods highlight the importance of achieving high pseudo-labeling (PL) accuracy and preventing model overfitting as the main challenges in SSDG. In this light, we show that the SSDG literature's excessive focus on PL accuracy, without consideration for maximum data utilization during training, limits potential performance improvements. We propose a novel approach to the SSDG problem by aligning the intermediate features of our model with the semantically rich and generalized feature space of a Vision Language Model (VLM) in a way that promotes domain-invariance. The above approach is enhanced with effective image-level augmentation and output-level regularization strategies to improve data utilization and minimize overfitting. Extensive experimentation across four benchmarks against existing SSDG baselines suggests that our method achieves SOTA results both qualitatively and quantitatively. The code will be made publicly available.