Semantic-Aware Mixup for Domain Generalization

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown exciting performance in various tasks, yet suffer generalization failures when meeting unknown target domains. One of the most promising approaches to achieve domain generalization (DG) is generating unseen data, e.g., mixup, to cover the unknown target data. However, existing works overlook the challenges induced by the simultaneous appearance of changes in both the semantic and distribution space. Accordingly, such a challenge makes source distributions hard to fit for DNNs. To mitigate the hard-fitting issue, we propose to perform a semantic-aware mixup (SAM) for domain generalization, where whether to perform mixup depends on the semantic and domain information. The feasibility of SAM shares the same spirits with the Fourier-based mixup. Namely, the Fourier phase spectrum is expected to contain semantics information (relating to labels), while the Fourier amplitude retains other information (relating to style information). Built upon the insight, SAM applies different mixup strategies to the Fourier phase spectrum and amplitude information. For instance, SAM merely performs mixup on the amplitude spectrum when both the semantic and domain information changes. Consequently, the overwhelmingly large change can be avoided. We validate the effectiveness of SAM using image classification tasks on several DG benchmarks.