Reappraising Domain Generalization in Neural Networks

Domain Generalization (DG) is perceived as a front face of OOD generalization. We present empirical evidence to show that the primary reason for generalization in DG is the presence of multiple domains while training. Furthermore, we show that methods for generalization in IID are equally important for generalization in DG. Tailored methods fail to add performance gains in the Traditional DG (TDG) evaluation. Our experiments prompt if TDG has outlived its usefulness in evaluating OOD generalization? To further strengthen our investigation, we propose a novel evaluation strategy, ClassWise DG (CWDG), where for each class, we randomly select one of the domains and keep it aside for testing. We argue that this benchmarking is closer to human learning and relevant in real-world scenarios. Counter-intuitively, despite being exposed to all domains during training, CWDG is more challenging than TDG evaluation. While explaining the observations, our work makes a case for more fundamental analysis around the DG problem before exploring new ideas to tackle it.