Robustness to Geographic Distribution Shift Using Location Encoders

Geographic distribution shift arises when the distribution of locations on Earth in a training dataset is different from what is seen at test time. The most common approaches to tackling geographic distribution shift treat regions delimited by administrative boundaries such as countries or continents as separate domains and apply standard domain adaptation methods, ignoring geographic coordinates that are often available as metadata. This paper proposes the use of location encoders for modeling continuous, learnable domain assignment. We show how both non-parametric sine-cosine encoders and pre-trained location encoders can be used in conjunction with standard domain adaptation methods for improved robustness to geographic distribution shift. Our proposed methods achieve new state-of-the-art results on two geo-tagged remote sensing datasets from the WILDS benchmark. We have made our code publicly available at: this https URL.