Causality-inspired comparative learning supervised model for domain generalization

Abstract

Machine learning is good at learning general knowledge and predictive knowledge from known and limited environments, and perform well in similar environments. However, their performance in unknown environments is not satisfactory. Machine learning focus on correlation learning, but correlation is not causality. The non-causal part of the correlation forms spurious correlation that affect the model's generalization ability. Therefore, it is necessary to examine machine learning from a causal perspective. By constructing structural causal models, it is found that the targets of different domains are instrumental variables of each other and can be mutually represented. They have same essential features and different domain features, which lead to causal correlation and spurious correlation with labels respectively. In this paper, a causal-inspired contrastive learning supervised model is designed to strengthen essential features and weaken domain features. With the target of improving the ability of model to capture causal correlations and reducing the interference of spurious correlations, we join transfer and autoencoder with image classification model as a cross-domain contrastive learning model. Experiments show that the proposed framework has a simple and easy-to-implement structure, it performs well on public datasets. By adopting visualization technology, the effects of this method are intuitively demonstrated.