Domain Generalization for Object Recognition with Multi-task Autoencoders Muhammad Ghifary W. Bastiaan Kleijn Mengjie Zhang David Balduzzi Victoria University of Wellington {muhammad.ghifary,bastiaan.kleijn,mengjie.zhang}@ecs.vuw.ac.nz,
[email protected] Abstract mains. For example, frontal-views and 45◦ rotated-views correspond to two different domains. Alternatively, we can The problem of domain generalization is to take knowl- associate views or domains with standard image datasets edge acquired from a number of related domains where such as PASCAL VOC2007 [14], and Office [31]. training data is available, and to then successfully apply The problem of learning from multiple source domains it to previously unseen domains. We propose a new fea- and testing on unseen target domains is referred to as do- ture learning algorithm, Multi-Task Autoencoder (MTAE), main generalization [6, 26]. A domain is a probability P Nk that provides good generalization performance for cross- distribution k from which samples {xi,yi}i=1 are drawn. domain object recognition. Source domains provide training samples, whereas distinct Our algorithm extends the standard denoising autoen- target domains are used for testing. In the standard super- coder framework by substituting artificially induced cor- vised learning framework, it is assumed that the source and ruption with naturally occurring inter-domain variability in target domains coincide. Dataset bias becomes a significant the appearance of objects. Instead of reconstructing images problem when training and test domains differ: applying a from noisy versions, MTAE learns to transform the original classifier trained on one dataset to images sampled from an- image into analogs in multiple related domains.