Domain Generalization with Correlated Style Uncertainty

Though impressive success has been witnessed in computer vision, deep learning still suffers from the domain shift challenge when the target domain for testing and the source domain for training do not share an identical distribution. To address this, domain generalization approaches intend to extract domain invariant features that can lead to a more robust model. Hence, increasing the source domain diversity is a key component of domain generalization. Style augmentation takes advantage of instance-specific feature statistics containing informative style characteristics to synthetic novel domains. However, all previous works ignored the correlation between different feature channels or only limited the style augmentation through linear interpolation. In this work, we propose a novel augmentation method, called \textit{Correlated Style Uncertainty (CSU)}, to go beyond the linear interpolation of style statistic space while preserving the essential correlation information. We validate our method's effectiveness by extensive experiments on multiple cross-domain classification tasks, including widely used PACS, Office-Home, Camelyon17 datasets and the Duke-Market1501 instance retrieval task and obtained significant margin improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available for public use.