Domain Generalization

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Overview

Domain generalization studies how models trained on one or more source environments can make reliable predictions when data shift across hospitals, cameras, sensors, users, locations, or time. Common approaches include learning invariant or disentangled features, causal modeling, adversarial and style-based augmentation, and adapting pretrained models with prompts, adapters, or mixtures of experts. Evaluation often uses leave-one-domain-out and cross-dataset tests, including benchmarks such as PACS and OfficeHome, alongside domain-specific measures of calibration and robustness. A central tension is that enforcing invariance can discard useful information or cause negative transfer, while many proposed methods offer only modest gains over empirical risk minimization and may not reflect deployment conditions.

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376 papers37 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

May 5, 2026

DECKER: Domain-invariant Embedding for Cross-Keyboard Extraction and Recognition

Acoustic side-channel attacks (ASCA) on keyboards pose a significant security risk, as keystrokes can be inferred from typing acoustics, revealing sensitive information. Prior ASCA studies are limited by small-scale datasets with restricted diversity in users, keyboards, and environments, constraining analysis across devices, microphones, and noise conditions. We introduce HEAR, a dataset designed to study ASCA along three axes: keyboard generalization, noise adaptation, and user bias. HEAR contains recordings from 53 participants using 37 laptop keyboards, collected in three realistic settings: (1) external microphone capture, (2) device microphone capture without network noise, and (3) VoIP-based streaming capture. This enables controlled evaluation across users, keyboards, and environments. On HEAR, we establish an ASCA benchmark spanning conventional features and pre-trained representations from raw audio and spectrograms in unimodal and multimodal settings. We propose DECKER, a domain-invariant keystroke inference framework with four stages: (1) Keyboard Signature Normalization to reduce device coloration, (2) domain-adversarial disentanglement to suppress keyboard identity, (3) supervised cross-keyboard contrastive alignment to enforce key consistency, and (4) Acoustic Style Randomization to synthesize unseen keyboard responses. We further explore sentence-level inference using an LLM-based post-processing layer to refine keystroke sequences via linguistic context. Results on HEAR show DECKER improves keystroke identification over strong baselines, particularly in cross-keyboard and cross-user settings, with further gains from language-model rectification. These findings highlight that ASCA remains effective across diverse users, devices, and noisy environments, underscoring its practical security risk.

Bikrant Bikram Pratap Maurya, Nitin Choudhury, Daksh Agarwal +1

IIIT-Delhi India · Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi India

Domain Generalization
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May 4, 2026

Validation of an AI-based end-to-end model for prostate pathology using long-term archived routine samples

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a clinical tool for prostate pathology, but generalization across variations in sample preparation and preservation over prolonged time periods remains poorly understood. We evaluated GleasonAI, an end-to-end attention-based multiple instance learning model, on an independent validation cohort comprising 10,366 biopsy cores from 1,028 patients across 14 Swedish regions, using archival diagnostic specimens from the ProMort cohorts collected between 1998-2015. The model achieved an overall quadratic-weighted kappa of 0.86 for core-level ISUP grading, comparable to several experienced pathologists and consistent across geographic regions. Notably, performance remained stable across the 17-year collection period, demonstrating robustness to time-related variation in archival material, a property not consistently observed with foundation model-based approaches, with exploratory analysis demonstrating a significant prognostic gradient across AI-assigned grade groups for prostate cancer-specific mortality. These findings support the generalizability of the AI grading model and demonstrate the potential of pathology archives as a large-scale resource for AI development, validation, and retrospective prognostic research.

Xiaoyi Ji, Renata Zelic, Oskar Aspegren +11

Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden · Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden · Department of Pelvic Cancer, Cancer Theme, Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden +8

Computational PathologyDomain GeneralizationOncologyHistopathology Image ClassificationProstate Cancer GradingCross-Dataset Generalization
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May 3, 2026

MER-DG: Modality-Entropy Regularization for Multimodal Domain Generalization

Deploying multimodal models in real-world scenarios requires generalization to new environments where recording conditions differ from training, a challenge known as multimodal domain generalization (MMDG). Standard architectures employ separate encoders for each modality and a fusion module, training the system end-to-end by optimizing on the fused features. In this paper, we identify that such joint optimization causes encoders to exploit cross-modal co-occurrences, statistical relationships between modalities that arise from source-specific recording conditions, rather than learning domain-invariant features. We term this failure mode Fusion Overfitting. To address this, we propose Modality-Entropy Regularization for Domain Generalization (MER-DG), which maximizes the entropy of each encoder's feature distribution to preserve feature diversity. MER-DG is architecture-agnostic and integrates into existing multimodal frameworks as an additive loss term. Extensive experiments on EPIC-Kitchens and HAC benchmarks demonstrate average improvements of approximately 5% over standard fusion and approximately 2% over state-of-the-art methods.

Yavuz Yarici, Ghassan AlRegib

1OLIVES at the Center for Signal and Information Processing CSIP, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.

Multimodal Domain GeneralizationDomain GeneralizationCross-Domain GeneralizationMultimodal FusionEntropy RegularizationFeature Fusion
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Apr 30, 2026

A Proof-of-Concept Study of Multitask Learning for Cranial Synthetic CT Generation Across Heterogeneous MRI Field Strengths

Accurate synthesis of computed tomography (CT) images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is clinically valuable for cranial applications such as attenuation correction, radiotherapy planning, and image-guided interventions. However, heterogeneity across MRI field strengths and acquisition protocols limits the generalizability of existing methods. In this study, we formulate cranial CT synthesis as a modular, structurally coupled problem and propose a deep learning framework to improve robustness across heterogeneous MRI conditions. The model is designed to adapt to variations in field strength and imaging protocols while preserving anatomical consistency. Experiments on multi-site datasets demonstrate improved performance and generalization compared with conventional approaches. The proposed method enables reliable CT synthesis across heterogeneous MRI settings, supporting broader clinical translation.

Zhuoyao Xin, Yiren Zhang, Christopher Wu +6

F.M. Kirby Research Center for Brain Imaging, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, 21205, United States. · Neurosection, Division of MR Research, Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, 21287, United States. · Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 21218, United States. +6

Domain GeneralizationMulti-Task LearningMagnetic Resonance ImagingMedical Image SynthesisComputed Tomography
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Apr 30, 2026

Dreaming Across Towns: Semantic Rollout and Town-Adversarial Regularization for Zero-Shot Held-Out-Town Fixed-Route Driving in CARLA

Driving agents trained in one simulated town often perform poorly in a new town because the road shapes, intersections, and lane layouts can be different. This paper studies how to improve this kind of transfer in the CARLA driving simulator without giving the agent any training data from the test towns. The agent is trained only in Town05 and Town06, then evaluated directly in Town03 and Town04. To focus on road-layout differences, all experiments use the same weather and traffic settings. We propose a training method that encourages the agent to learn features that are useful across towns rather than features tied to one training town. During training, the agent is asked to predict the high-level visual meaning of future camera views and is also discouraged from relying on cues that reveal which source town the data came from. These extra learning signals are used only during training; at test time, the driving policy uses the same observation and control interface as the baseline agent. In controlled comparisons with matched DreamerV3-style world-model driving agents, the proposed method achieves the highest mean held-out success: 36.6% on Town03 with a 95% confidence interval of [30.5, 42.7] and 85.6% on Town04 with a 95% confidence interval of [84.0, 87.2], computed across five training seeds. Seed-paired tests against the strongest primary baselines show positive success-rate differences in both held-out towns. Additional experiments show that predicting future visual meaning alone or removing town-specific cues alone is not enough to match the combined method. These results suggest that combining future-scene understanding with reduced reliance on source-town-specific features can improve cross-town driving performance in this CARLA setting.

Feeza Khan Khanzada, Jaerock Kwon

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Michigan–Dearborn, Dearborn, MI 48128 USA

Domain GeneralizationCross-Domain GeneralizationRL for Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Simulation
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Apr 30, 2026

A generalised pre-training strategy for deep learning networks in semantic segmentation of remotely sensed images

In the segmentation of remotely sensed images, deep learning models are typically pre-trained using large image databases like ImageNet before fine-tuned on domain-specific datasets. However, the performance of these fine-tuned models is often hindered by the large domain gaps (i.e., differences in scenes and modalities) between ImageNet's images and remotely sensed images being processed. Therefore, many researchers have undertaken efforts to establish large-scale domain-specific image datasets for pre-training, aiming to enhance model performance. However, establishing such datasets is often challenging, requiring significant effort, and these datasets often exhibit limited generaliza-bility to other application scenarios. To address these issues, this study introduces a novel yet simple pre-training strategy designed to guide a model away from learning domain-specific features in a pre-training dataset during pre-training, thereby improving the generalisation ability of the pre-trained model. To evaluate the strategy's effectiveness, deep learning models are pre-trained on ImageNet and subsequently fine-tuned on four semantic segmentation datasets with diverse scenes and modalities, including iSAID, MFNet, PST900 and Potsdam. Experimental results show that the proposed pre-training strategy led to state-of-the-art accuracies on all four datasets, namely 67.4% mIoU for iSAID, 56.9% mIoU for MFNet, 84.22% mIoU for PST900, 91.88% mF1 for Potsdam. This research lays the groundwork for developing a unified foundation model applicable to both computer vision and remote sensing applications.

Yuan Fang, Yuanzhi Cai, Jagannath Aryal +4

Department of Civil Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou 215000, China · CSIRO Mineral Resources, Kensington, WA 6151, Australia · Department of Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne VIC 3010, Australia

Remote Sensing Image SegmentationDomain GeneralizationRemote Sensing
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Apr 29, 2026

Bridge: Basis-Driven Causal Inference Marries VFMs for Domain Generalization

Detectors often suffer from degraded performance, primarily due to the distributional gap between the source and target domains. This issue is especially evident in single-source domains with limited data, as models tend to rely on confounders (e.g., illumination, co-occurrence, and style) from the source domain, leading to spurious correlations that hinder generalization. To this end, this paper proposes a novel Basis-driven framework for domain generalization, namely Bridge, that incorporates causal inference into object detection. By learning the low-rank bases for front-door adjustment, Bridge blocks confounders' effects to mitigate spurious correlations, while simultaneously refining representations by filtering redundant and task-irrelevant components. Bridge can be seamlessly integrated with both discriminative (e.g., DINOv2/3, SAM) and generative (e.g., Stable Diffusion) Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). Extensive experiments across multiple domain generalization object detection datasets, i.e., Cross-Camera, Adverse Weather, Real-to-Artistic, Diverse Weather Datasets, and Diverse Weather DroneVehicle (our newly augmented real-world UAV-based benchmark), underscore the superiority of our proposed method over previous state-of-the-art approaches. The project page is available at: https://mingbohong.github.io/Bridge/.

Mingbo Hong, Feng Liu, Caroline Gevaert +2

University of Twente · 2Drexel University

Domain GeneralizationCross-Domain GeneralizationCausal Inference
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Apr 28, 2026

Robust Representation Learning through Explicit Environment Modeling

We consider learning from labeled data collected across multiple environments, where the data distribution may vary across these environments. This problem is commonly approached from a causal perspective, seeking invariant representations that retain causal factors while discarding spurious ones. However, this framework assumes that the environment has no direct effect on the target. In contrast, we consider settings in which this assumption fails, but still aim to learn representations that support robust prediction on average across previously unseen environments. To this end, we study representations learned by explicitly modeling variation across environments and then marginalizing that variation out. We analyze the resulting representations and characterize when they are preferable to those learned by causal invariant-representation methods. We propose a concrete method based on generalized random-intercept models, a class of predictors in which such marginalization is possible, and study their generalization properties. Empirically, we show that these models outperform invariant-learning methods across a range of challenging settings.

Yuli Slavutsky, David M. Blei

Department of Statistics Columbia University · Departments of Statistics and Computer Science Columbia University

Representation LearningDomain GeneralizationInvariant Representation Learning
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Apr 25, 2026

A Hierarchical Ensemble Inference Pipeline for Robust White Blood Cell Classification Under Domain Shifts

Automated white blood cell (WBC) classification is essential for scalable leukaemia screening. However, real-world deployment is challenged by domain shifts caused by staining protocols, scanner characteristics, and inter-laboratory variability, which often degrade model performance. The White Blood Cell Classification Challenge (WBCBench) at ISBI 2026 aims to advance robust WBC recognition, with a focus on accurately identifying blast cells and other clinically critical rare subtypes. We propose a memory-augmented, hierarchical ensemble pipeline for WBC classification under domain shifts, leveraging a feature bank and a DinoBloom backbone fine-tuned with LoRA. Our three-stage inference hierarchy combines k-nearest neighbors (kNN) retrieval at each level, reducing over-reliance on any single decision. Evaluated on the WBCBench dataset, our method ranks within the top ten by macro F1-score in the final testing phase.

Ruyi Dai, Tingkwong Ng, Hao Chen

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China · Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China · Division of Life Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China +2

Hierarchical ClassificationEnsemble LearningDomain GeneralizationMedical Image ClassificationWhite Blood Cell Classification
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Apr 24, 2026

EV-CLIP: Efficient Visual Prompt Adaptation for CLIP in Few-shot Action Recognition under Visual Challenges

CLIP has demonstrated strong generalization in visual domains through natural language supervision, even for video action recognition. However, most existing approaches that adapt CLIP for action recognition have primarily focused on temporal modeling, often overlooking spatial perception. In real-world scenarios, visual challenges such as low-light environments or egocentric viewpoints can severely impair spatial understanding, an essential precursor for effective temporal reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose Efficient Visual Prompting for CLIP (EV-CLIP), an efficient adaptation framework designed for few-shot video action recognition across diverse scenes and viewpoints. EV-CLIP introduces two visual prompts: mask prompts, which guide the model's attention to action-relevant regions by reweighting pixels, and context prompts, which perform lightweight temporal modeling by compressing frame-wise features into a compact representation. For a comprehensive evaluation, we curate five benchmark datasets and analyze domain shifts to quantify the influence of diverse visual and semantic factors on action recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that EV-CLIP outperforms existing parameter-efficient methods in overall performance. Moreover, its efficiency remains independent of the backbone scale, making it well-suited for deployment in real-world, resource-constrained scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/AI-CV-Lab/EV-CLIP.

Hyo Jin Jon, Longbin Jin, Eun Yi Kim

Computer Vision Lab., Konkuk University, Seoul, South Korea

VLM AdaptationDomain GeneralizationFew-Shot LearningVideo Action RecognitionVisual Prompt Learning
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Apr 24, 2026

Are Natural-Domain Foundation Models Effective for Accelerated Cardiac MRI Reconstruction?

The emergence of large-scale pretrained foundation models has transformed computer vision, enabling strong performance across diverse downstream tasks. However, their potential for physics-based inverse problems, such as accelerated cardiac MRI reconstruction, remains largely underexplored. In this work, we investigate whether natural-domain foundation models can serve as effective image priors for accelerated cardiac MRI reconstruction, and compare the performance obtained against domain-specific counterparts such as BiomedCLIP. We propose an unrolled reconstruction framework that incorporates pretrained, frozen visual encoders, such as CLIP, DINOv2, and BiomedCLIP, within each cascade to guide the reconstruction process. Through extensive experiments, we show that while task-specific state-of-the-art reconstruction models such as E2E-VarNet achieve superior performance in standard in-distribution settings, foundation-model-based approaches remain competitive. More importantly, in challenging cross-domain scenarios, where models are trained on cardiac MRI and evaluated on anatomically distinct knee and brain datasets--foundation models exhibit improved robustness, particularly under high acceleration factors and limited low-frequency sampling. We further observe that natural-image-pretrained models, such as CLIP, learn highly transferable structural representations, while domain-specific pretraining (BiomedCLIP) provides modest additional gains in more ill-posed regimes. Overall, our results suggest that pretrained foundation models offer a promising source of transferable priors, enabling improved robustness and generalization in accelerated MRI reconstruction.

Anam Hashmi, Mayug Maniparambil, Julia Dietlmeier +2

1Dublin City University, Ireland · University College Dublin, Ireland

Domain GeneralizationVision Foundation Model AdaptationAccelerated MRI ReconstructionMedical Image Representation LearningCardiac MRI
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Apr 24, 2026

Generalizable CT-Free PET Attenuation and Scatter Correction for Pediatric Patients

Computed tomography (CT)-based attenuation and scatter correction improves quantitative PET but adds radiation exposure that is particularly undesirable in pediatric imaging. Existing CT-free methods are commonly trained in homogeneous settings and often degrade under scanner or radiotracer shifts, which limits their clinical utility. We propose the Generalizable PET Correction Network (GPCN), a dual-domain network for domain-robust CT-free PET attenuation and scatter correction. GPCN combines a multi-band contextual refinement module, which models pediatric anatomical variability through wavelet-based multiscale decomposition and long-range spatial context modeling, with a frequency-aware spectral decoupling module, which performs coordinate-conditioned amplitude/phase refinement in the Fourier domain. By synergizing multi-band spatial contextual modeling with asymmetric frequency-spectrum decoupling, the network explicitly separates invariant topological structures from domain-specific noise, thereby achieving precise quantitative recovery of both anatomical organs and focal lesions. This design aims to separate anatomy-dominant structures from domain-sensitive spectral residuals and to improve robustness across heterogeneous imaging conditions. We train and evaluate the method on 1085 pediatric whole-body PET scans acquired with two scanners and five radiotracers. In both joint training and zero-shot cross-domain evaluation, GPCN outperforms representative baselines and maintains stable quantitative accuracy on unseen scanner-tracer combinations. The method is further supported by ablation, region-wise quantitative analysis, and downstream segmentation experiments. In our cohort, the CT component of the conventional protocol corresponded to an average effective dose of 10.8 mSv, indicating the potential clinical value of reliable CT-free correction for pediatric PET.

Jia-Mian Wu, Jun Liu, Siqi Li +7

School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China · Department of Nuclear Medicine, Beijing Friendship Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100050, China · Department of Radiology, Beijing Children’s Hospital, Capital Medical University, National Center for Children’s Health, Beijing 100045, China

Medical ImagingDomain GeneralizationPET/CT Imaging
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Apr 23, 2026

Generalizing Numerical Reasoning in Table Data through Operation Sketches and Self-Supervised Learning

Numerical reasoning over expert-domain tables often exhibits high in-domain accuracy but limited robustness to domain shift. Models trained with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on specific datasets tend to rely on header-operation shortcuts rather than structural reasoning. We introduce TaNOS, a continual pre-training framework comprising three components: (i) header anonymization to reduce lexical memorization, (ii) operation sketches that provide minimal structural cues, and (iii) self-supervised pretraining that constructs correctness-guaranteed program-question pairs from given tables in a program-first manner. By decoupling domain semantics and numerical operation structure, TaNOS improves the transferability of numerical reasoning. Applied to an 8B instruction-tuned model, TaNOS achieves 80.13% execution accuracy on FinQA with only 10% train data, outperforming SFT baseline (73.97%) with full train data and proprietary models such as GPT-5, Gemini-2.5-Pro. Furthermore, in the domain-shift experiments, TaNOS displays nearly-negligible cross-domain gap (<2pp) when standard SFT shows over 10pp gap. These results suggest that structural guidance with operation sketches, header-agnostic representations, and correctness-guaranteed self-supervision can improve the robustness of numerical reasoning across diverse expert-domain tables.

Hanjun Cho, Gahyun Yoo, Hanseong Kim +1

Seoul National University · Soongsil University

Table QASelf-Supervised Pre-TrainingDomain GeneralizationProgram Synthesis
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Apr 23, 2026

Explainable Disentangled Representation Learning for Generalizable Authorship Attribution in the Era of Generative AI

Learning robust representations of authorial style is crucial for authorship attribution and AI-generated text detection. However, existing methods often struggle with content-style entanglement, where models learn spurious correlations between authors' writing styles and topics, leading to poor generalization across domains. To address this challenge, we propose Explainable Authorship Variational Autoencoder (EAVAE), a novel framework that explicitly disentangles style from content through architectural separation-by-design. EAVAE first pretrains style encoders using supervised contrastive learning on diverse authorship data, then finetunes with a Variational Autoencoder (VEA) architecture using separate encoders for style and content representations. Disentanglement is enforced through a novel discriminator that not only distinguishes whether pairs of style/content representations belong to the same or different authors/content sources, but also generates natural language explanation for their decision, simultaneously mitigating confounding information and enhancing interpretability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EAVAE. On authorship attribution, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on various datasets, including Amazon Reviews, PAN21, and HRS. For AI-generated text detection, EAVAE excels in few-shot learning over the M4 dataset. Code and data repositories are available online\footnote{https://github.com/hieum98/avae} \footnote{https://huggingface.co/collections/Hieuman/document-level-authorship-datasets}.

Hieu Man, Van-Cuong Pham, Nghia Trung Ngo +2

University of Oregon, OR, USA · Adobe Research, CA, USA

Variational AutoencodersDisentangled Representation LearningExplainable Artificial IntelligenceAI-Generated Text DetectionDomain GeneralizationAuthorship Attribution
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Apr 23, 2026

Robust Cross-Domain WiFi Fall Detection via Physics-Driven Attention-Enhanced Transformers

Device-free fall detection utilizing WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) has emerged as a promising, privacy-preserving solution for elderly health monitoring in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. However, existing deep learning approaches suffer from severe performance degradation when deployed in unseen environments due to static background overfitting and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) signal attenuation. To address these critical bottlenecks, we propose a robust, domain-generalizable framework featuring a novel Attention-Enhanced CNN-Transformer hybrid architecture. First, we design a physics-driven Dynamic Variance Gate (DVG) to dynamically calculate local temporal variance, acting as a soft-attention mask that eliminates static environmental DC components while amplifying dynamic human motion. Second, we introduce a Physics-Aware Data Augmentation strategy to force the network to learn invariant morphological signatures rather than environment-specific noise. Furthermore, a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is integrated to refine spatiotemporal features prior to Transformer-based sequence modeling. Extensive cross-domain evaluations across four distinct indoor environments demonstrate that our method achieves 97.6% accuracy in NLoS scenarios and 98.8% in completely unseen environments without target-domain fine-tuning. Finally, we deploy the proposed framework on an edge computing system equipped with commercial WiFi NICs. Real-world live inference field tests confirm the system's robustness against unseen environmental layouts and its capability for continuous, low-latency whole-home safety monitoring.

Yingzhe Wang, Cunhua Pan, Ruijing Liu +4

National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China · Department of Computer Science, Brunel University London, UB8 3PH Uxbridge, U.K. · Pervasive Communication Research Center, Purple Mountain Laboratories, Nanjing 211111, China

Data AugmentationHybrid CNN-Transformer ArchitecturesDomain GeneralizationWi-Fi Sensing
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Apr 21, 2026

Benchmarking Vision Foundation Models for Domain-Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) remains challenging due to the requirement for robust domain generalization across unseen environments. While recent trends leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for semantic supervision, these multimodal approaches often demand prohibitive computational resources and exhibit high inference latency. Furthermore, their efficacy is inherently limited by the quality of the underlying visual features. This paper revisits the potential of vision-only foundation models to establish a highly efficient and robust baseline for FAS. We conduct a systematic benchmarking of 15 pre-trained models, such as supervised CNNs, supervised ViTs, and self-supervised ViTs, under severe cross-domain scenarios including the MICO and Limited Source Domains (LSD) protocols. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that self-supervised vision models, particularly DINOv2 with Registers, significantly suppress attention artifacts and capture critical, fine-grained spoofing cues. Combined with Face Anti-Spoofing Data Augmentation (FAS-Aug), Patch-wise Data Augmentation (PDA) and Attention-weighted Patch Loss (APL), our proposed vision-only baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance in the MICO protocol. This baseline outperforms existing methods under the data-constrained LSD protocol while maintaining superior computational efficiency. This work provides a definitive vision-only baseline for FAS, demonstrating that optimized self-supervised vision transformers can serve as a backbone for both vision-only and future multimodal FAS systems. The project page is available at: https://gsisaoki.github.io/FAS-VFMbenchmark-CVPRW2026/ .

Mika Feng, Pierre Gallin-Martel, Koichi Ito +1

Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Japan

Vision Foundation ModelsDomain GeneralizationEfficient ViTsFace Anti-SpoofingSelf-Supervised Visual Representation Learning
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Apr 20, 2026

Match-Any-Events: Zero-Shot Motion-Robust Feature Matching Across Wide Baselines for Event Cameras

Event cameras have recently shown promising capabilities in instantaneous motion estimation due to their robustness to low light and fast motions. However, computing wide-baseline correspondence between two arbitrary views remains a significant challenge, since event appearance changes substantially with motion, and learning-based approaches are constrained by both scalability and limited wide-baseline supervision. We therefore introduce the first event matching model that achieves cross-dataset wide-baseline correspondence in a zero-shot manner: a single model trained once is deployed on unseen datasets without any target-domain fine-tuning or adaptation. To enable this capability, we introduce a motion-robust and computationally efficient attention backbone that learns multi-timescale features from event streams, augmented with sparsity-aware event token selection, making large-scale training on diverse wide-baseline supervision computationally feasible. To provide the supervision needed for wide-baseline generalization, we develop a robust event motion synthesis framework to generate large-scale event-matching datasets with augmented viewpoints, modalities, and motions. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that our framework achieves a 37.7% improvement over the previous best event feature matching methods. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/spikelab-jhu/Match-Any-Events.

Ruijun Zhang, Hang Su, Kostas Daniilidis +1

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD 21218, USA · ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China · University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA 19104, USA +1

Event-Based VisionDomain GeneralizationLocal Feature Matching
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Apr 20, 2026

A Controlled Benchmark of Visual State-Space Backbones with Domain-Shift and Boundary Analysis for Remote-Sensing Segmentation

Visual state-space models (SSMs) are increasingly promoted as efficient alternatives to Vision Transformers, yet their practical advantages remain unclear under fair comparison because existing studies rarely isolate encoder effects from decoder and training choices. We present a strictly controlled benchmark of representative visual SSM families, including VMamba, MambaVision, and Spatial-Mamba, for remote-sensing semantic segmentation, in which only the encoder varies across experiments. Evaluated on LoveDA and ISPRS Potsdam under a unified 4-stage feature interface and a fixed lightweight decoder, the benchmark reveals three main findings, intra-family scaling yields only modest gains, cross-domain generalization is strongly asymmetric, and boundary delineation is the dominant failure mode under distribution shift. Although visual SSMs achieve favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-offs relative to the controlled CNN and Transformer baselines considered here, the results suggest that future improvements are more likely to come from robustness-oriented design and boundary-aware decoding than from encoder scaling alone. By isolating encoder behavior under a unified and reproducible protocol, this study establishes a practical reference benchmark for the design and evaluation of future Mamba-based segmentation backbones

Nichula Wasalathilaka, Dineth Perera, Oshadha Samarakoon +4

University of Peradeniya Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

Remote Sensing Image SegmentationDomain GeneralizationVisual SSMsSemantic Segmentation
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Apr 19, 2026

From Adaptation to Generalization: Adaptive Visual Prompting for Medical Image Segmentation

Visual prompting has emerged as a powerful method for adapting pre-trained models to new domains without updating model parameters. However, existing prompting methods typically optimize a single prompt per domain and apply it uniformly to all inputs, limiting their ability to generalize under intra and inter-domain variability, which is especially critical in the medical field. To address this, we propose APEX, an Adaptive Prompt EXtraction framework that retrieves input-specific prompts from a learnable prompt memory. The memory stores diverse, domain-discriminative prompt representations and is queried via domain features extracted from the Fourier spectrum. To learn robust and discriminative domain features, we introduce a novel Low-Frequency Feature Contrastive (LFC) learning framework that clusters representations from the same domain while separating those from different domains. Extensive experiments on two medical segmentation tasks demonstrate that APEX significantly improves generalization across both seen and unseen domains. Furthermore, it complements any existing backbones and consistently enhances performance, confirming its effectiveness as a plug-and-play prompting solution in medical fields. The code is available at https://github.com/cetinkayaevren/apex/

Evren Çetinkaya, Sangmin Lee, Jung Uk Kim +2

Technical University of Munich · Korea University · Kyung Hee University +1

Domain GeneralizationMedical Image SegmentationVisual Prompt Learning
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Apr 18, 2026

CrossFlowDG: Bridging the Modality Gap with Cross-modal Flow Matching for Domain Generalization

Domain generalization (DG) aims to maintain performance under domain shift, which in computer vision appears primarily as stylistic variations that cause models to overfit to domain-specific appearance cues rather than class semantics. To overcome this, recent methods use textual representations as stable, domain-invariant anchors. However, multimodal approaches that rely on cosine similarity-based contrastive alignment leave a modality gap where image and text embeddings remain geometrically separated despite semantic correspondence. We propose CrossFlowDG, a novel DG framework that addresses this residual gap using noise-free, cross-modal flow matching. By learning a continuous transformation in the joint Euclidean latent space, our framework explicitly transports domain-biased image embeddings toward domain-invariant text embeddings of the correct class. Using the efficient VMamba image encoder and CLIP's text encoder, CrossFlowDG is tested against four common DG benchmarks, and achieves competitive performance on several benchmarks and state-of-the-art on TerraIncognita. Code is available at: https://github.com/ajkrit/CrossFlowDG

Antonios Kritikos, Nikolaos Spanos, Athanasios Voulodimos

National Technical University of Athens

Cross-Modal LearningCross-Modal AlignmentDomain GeneralizationCross-Domain GeneralizationMultimodal Domain Generalization
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Apr 18, 2026

LADDER: Landmark-Only Lip-Sync Deepfake Detection Across Generators and Languages

We propose LADDER, a lip-sync deepfake detector that uses only the trajectories of 64 lip landmarks. It needs no pixels and no audio. We find two problems that make such a detector fail across domains. First, frame rate is a confounding factor. On PolyGlotFake, real and fake videos differ in frame rate, and the direction of this difference changes across languages. We remove it by resampling every trajectory to 25 fps. Second, motion amplitude does not transfer across generators: some generators move the mouth more than real speakers, and others move it less. The slope across derivative orders does transfer, because it is higher in fake videos for all five generators we test. LADDER combines a small trained detector (0.31 M parameters) with a prior score that needs no training: the mean of the slope features, standardized on real videos only. Learning this direction from data, or selecting it on the training domain, transfers worse. LADDER runs at 7.2 times real time on one CPU core. It reaches 0.925 AUC on LipSyncTIMIT at CRF=23 and 0.850 on seven languages of PolyGlotFake, comparable to pixel-based and audio-visual detectors. It is also more robust than a retrained Xception and is ahead in all 14 settings with stronger compression or image corruption, for example 0.883 against 0.579 under strong blur. Finally, a decision threshold does not transfer across domains, but 20 unlabeled real videos bring the false positive rate back to at most 3.5%.

Hao Chen, Junnan Xu

Independent Researcher

Domain GeneralizationDeepfake Detection
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Apr 17, 2026

Continuous ageing trajectory representations for knee-aware lifetime prediction of lithium-ion batteries across heterogeneous dataset

Accurate assessment of lithium-ion battery ageing is challenged by cell-to-cell variability, heterogeneous cycling protocols, and limited transferability of data-driven models across datasets. In particular, robust identification of degradation transitions, such as the knee point, and reliable early-life prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) remain open problems. This study proposes a unified framework for battery ageing analysis based on continuous representations of voltage-capacity and capacity-cycle trajectories learned from heterogeneous public datasets (NASA, CALCE, ISU-ILCC). The continuous formulation enables consistent extraction of degradation descriptors, including curvature, plateau length and knee-related metrics, while reducing sensitivity to dataset-specific discretisation. Across more than 250 cells, statistically significant correlations between knee onset and end-of-life (Pearson 0.75-0.84) are observed. Additional early-life analysis confirms that knee-related features retain predictive value when estimated from partial trajectories. Early-life models provide increasingly stable RUL predictions as the number of observed cycles increases, with meaningful predictive performance emerging within the first 5-20 cycles and remain robust under cross-dataset domain shift. The framework integrates continuous modelling, feature extraction and uncertainty-aware prediction, providing an interpretable and dataset-consistent approach demonstrating robustness across heterogeneous dataset types. Compared with conventional discrete or feature-based methods, the proposed representation reduces sensitivity to sampling resolution and improves cross-dataset consistency. The study is limited to laboratory-scale datasets and capacity-based end-of-life definitions.

Agnieszka Pregowska, Stefan Marynowicz

RUL EstimationDomain GeneralizationTime Series Representation LearningLithium-Ion Batteries
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Apr 17, 2026

NeuroLip: An Event-driven Spatiotemporal Learning Framework for Cross-Scene Lip-Motion-based Visual Speaker Recognition

Visual speaker recognition based on lip motion offers a silent, hands-free, and behavior-driven biometric solution that remains effective even when acoustic cues are unavailable. Compared to traditional methods that rely heavily on appearance-dependent representations, lip motion encodes subject-specific behavioral dynamics driven by consistent articulation patterns and muscle coordination, offering inherent stability across environmental changes. However, capturing these robust, fine-grained dynamics is challenging for conventional frame-based cameras due to motion blur and low dynamic range. To exploit the intrinsic stability of lip motion and address these sensing limitations, we propose NeuroLip, an event-based framework that captures fine-grained lip dynamics under a strict yet practical cross-scene protocol: training is performed under a single controlled condition, while recognition must generalize to unseen viewing and lighting conditions. NeuroLip features a 1) Temporal-aware Voxel Encoding module with adaptive event weighting, 2) Structure-aware Spatial Enhancer that amplifies discriminative behavioral patterns by suppressing noise while preserving vertically structured motion information, and 3) Polarity Consistency Regularization mechanism to retain motion-direction cues encoded in event polarities. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we introduce DVSpeaker, a comprehensive event-based lip-motion dataset comprising 50 subjects recorded under four distinct viewpoint and illumination scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuroLip achieves near-perfect matched-scene accuracy and robust cross-scene generalization, attaining over 71% accuracy on unseen viewpoints and nearly 76% under low-light conditions, outperforming representative existing methods by at least 8.54%. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/JiuZeongit/NeuroLip.

Junguang Yao, Wenye Liu, Stjepan Picek +1

School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangdong, 518172, P.R. China · independent researcher · Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia +1

Event-Based VisionDomain GeneralizationVisual Speaker Recognition
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Apr 17, 2026

P3T: Prototypical Point-level Prompt Tuning with Enhanced Generalization for 3D Vision-Language Models

With the rise of pre-trained models in the 3D point cloud domain for a wide range of real-world applications, adapting them to downstream tasks has become increasingly important. However, conventional full fine-tuning methods are computationally expensive and storage-intensive. Although prompt tuning has emerged as an efficient alternative, it often suffers from overfitting, thereby compromising generalization capability. To address this issue, we propose Prototypical Point-level Prompt Tuning (P3^3T), a parameter-efficient prompt tuning method designed for pre-trained 3D vision-language models (VLMs). P3^3T consists of two components: 1) Point Prompter, which generates instance-aware point-level prompts for the input point cloud, and 2) Text Prompter, which employs learnable prompts into the input text instead of hand-crafted ones. Since both prompters operate directly on input data, P3^3T enables task-specific adaptation of 3D VLMs without sacrificing generalizability. Furthermore, to enhance embedding space alignment, which is key to fine-tuning 3D VLMs, we introduce a prototypical loss that reduces intra-category variance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method matches or outperforms full fine-tuning in classification and few-shot learning, and further exhibits robust generalization under data shift in the cross-dataset setting. The code is available at \textcolor{violet}{https://github.com/gyjung975/P3T}.

Geunyoung Jung, Soohong Kim, Kyungwoo Song +1

Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Seoul, South Korea · Department of Applied Statistics, Yonsei University, South Korea

Point Cloud ClassificationVLM AdaptationDomain GeneralizationVisual Prompt Learning3D VLMs
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Apr 16, 2026

CXR-LT 2026 Challenge: Multi-Center Long-Tailed and Zero Shot Chest X-ray Classification

Chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation is hindered by the long-tailed distribution of pathologies and the open-world nature of clinical environments. Existing benchmarks often rely on closed-set classes from a single institution, failing to capture the prevalence of rare diseases or the appearance of novel findings. To address this, we present the CXR-LT challenge. The first event, CXR-LT 2023, established a large-scale benchmark for long-tailed multi-label CXR classification and identified key challenges in rare disease recognition. CXR-LT 2024 further expanded the label space and introduced a zero-shot task to study generalization to unseen findings. Building on the success of CXR-LT 2023 and 2024, this third iteration of the benchmark introduces a multi-center dataset comprising over 145,000 images from PadChest and NIH Chest X-ray datasets. Additionally, all development and test sets in CXR-LT 2026 are annotated by radiologists, providing a more reliable and clinically grounded evaluation than report-derived labels. The challenge defines two core tasks this year: (1) Robust Multi-Label Classification on 30 known classes and (2) Open-World Generalization to 6 unseen (out-of-distribution) rare disease classes. This paper summarizes the overview of the CXR-LT 2026 challenge. We describe the data collection and annotation procedures, analyze solution strategies adopted by participating teams, and evaluate head-versus-tail performance, calibration, and cross-center generalization gaps. Our results show that vision-language foundation models improve both in-distribution and zero-shot performance, but detecting rare findings under multi-center shift remains challenging. Our study provides a foundation for developing and evaluating AI systems in realistic long-tailed and open-world clinical conditions.

Hexin Dong, Yi Lin, Pengyu Zhou +25

Department of Population Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, USA · Department of Radiology, Fuwai Hospital, National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China · Department of Radiology, West China School of Medicine, Sichuan University, Sichuan University Affiliated Chengdu Second People’s Hospital, Chengdu Second People’s Hospital, Chengdu, China +20

Zero-Shot LearningLong-Tailed ClassificationChest X-Ray ClassificationDomain GeneralizationOpen-Set RecognitionMedical Image Benchmarks
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Apr 16, 2026

Attention-Gated Convolutional Networks for Scanner-Agnostic Quality Assessment

Motion artifacts present a significant challenge in structural MRI (sMRI), often compromising clinical diagnostics and large-scale automated analysis. While manual quality control (QC) remains the gold standard, it is increasingly unscalable for massive longitudinal studies. To address this, we propose a hybrid CNN-Attention framework designed for robust, site-invariant MRI quality assessment. Our architecture integrates a hierarchical 2D CNN encoder for local spatial feature extraction with a multi-head cross-attention mechanism to model global dependencies. This synergy enables the model to prioritize motion relevant artifact signatures, such as ringing and blurring, while dynamically filtering out site-specific intensity variations and background noise. The framework was trained end-to-end on the MR-ART dataset using a balanced cohort of 200 subjects. Performance was evaluated across two tiers: Seen Site Evaluation on a held-out MR-ART partition and Unseen Site Evaluation using 200 subjects from 17 heterogeneous sites in the ABIDE archive. On seen sites, the model achieved a scan-level accuracy of 0.9920 and an F1-score of 0.9919. Crucially, it maintained strong generalization across unseen ABIDE sites (Acc = 0.755) without any retraining or fine-tuning, demonstrating high resilience to domain shift. These results indicate that attention-based feature re-weighting successfully captures universal artifact descriptors, bridging the performance gap between diverse imaging environments and scanner manufacturers.

Chinmay Bakhale, Anil Sao

Indian Institute of Technology, Bhilai, India

Hybrid CNN-Transformer ArchitecturesMedical Image AnalysisDomain GeneralizationMedical Image Quality AssessmentMagnetic Resonance ImagingImage Quality Assessment
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Apr 16, 2026

Open-Set Vein Biometric Recognition with Deep Metric Learning

Most state-of-the-art vein recognition methods rely on closed-set classification, which inherently limits their scalability and prevents the adaptive enrollment of new users without complete model retraining. We rigorously evaluate the computational boundaries of Deep Metric Learning (DML) under strict open-set constraints. Unlike standard closed-set approaches, we analyze the impact of data scarcity and domain shift on recognition performance. Our approach learns discriminative L2-normalised embeddings and employs prototype-based matching with a calibrated similarity threshold to effectively distinguish between enrolled users and unseen impostors. We evaluate the framework under a strict subject-disjoint protocol across four diverse datasets covering finger, wrist, and dorsal hand veins (MMCBNU 6000, UTFVP, FYO, and a dorsal hand-vein dataset). On the large-scale MMCBNU 6000 benchmark, our best model (ResNet50-CBAM) achieves an OSCR of 0.9945, AUROC of 0.9974, and EER of 1.57%, maintaining high identification accuracy (99.6% Rank-1) while robustly rejecting unknown subjects. Cross-dataset experiments evaluate the framework's generalisation across different acquisition setups, confirming that while the model handles large-scale data robustly, performance remains sensitive to domain shifts in low-data regimes. Ablation studies demonstrate that triplet-based objectives combined with a simple 1-NN classifier offer an optimal trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, enabling real-time deployment on commodity hardware.

Paweł Pilarek, Marcel Musiałek, Anna Górska

Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Wroclaw, Poland

Biometric IdentificationDomain GeneralizationOpen-Set RecognitionMetric Learning
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Apr 14, 2026

GeoLink: A 3D-aware Framework to Improve Generalization for Cross-view Geo-localization

Generalizable cross-view geo-localization aims to match the same location across views in unseen regions and conditions without GPS supervision. Its core difficulty lies in severe semantic inconsistency caused by viewpoint variation and poor generalization under domain shift. Existing methods mainly rely on 2D correspondence, but they are easily distracted by redundant shared information across views, leading to less transferable representations. To address this, we propose GeoLink, a 3D-aware semantic-consistent framework for Generalizable cross-view geo-localization. Specifically, we offline reconstruct scene point clouds from multi-view drone images using VGGT, providing stable structural priors. Based on these 3D anchors, we improve 2D representation learning in two complementary ways. A Geometric-aware Semantic Refinement module mitigates potentially redundant and view-biased dependencies in 2D features under 3D guidance. In addition, a Unified View Relation Distillation module transfers 3D structural relations to 2D features, improving cross-view alignment while preserving a 2D-only inference pipeline. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that GeoLink consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves superior generalization across unseen domains and diverse weather environments.

Hongyang Zhang, Yinhao Liu, Haitao Zhang +4

Xiamen University · Tongji University

Cross-View Geo-LocalizationGeospatial Representation LearningDomain Generalization
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Apr 13, 2026

Towards Brain MRI Foundation Models for the Clinic: Findings from the FOMO25 Challenge

Clinical deployment of automated brain MRI analysis faces a fundamental challenge: clinical data is heterogeneous and noisy, and high-quality labels are prohibitively costly to obtain. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can address this by leveraging the vast amounts of unlabeled data produced in clinical workflows to train robust foundation models that adapt out-of-domain with minimal supervision. However, the development of foundation models for brain MRI has been limited by small pretraining datasets and in-domain benchmarking focused on high-quality, research-grade data. To address this gap, we organized the FOMO25 challenge as a satellite event at MICCAI 2025. FOMO25 provided participants with a large pretraining dataset, FOMO60K, and evaluated models on data sourced directly from clinical workflows in few-shot and out-of-domain settings. Tasks covered infarct classification, meningioma segmentation, and brain age regression, and considered both models trained on FOMO60K (method track) and any data (open track). Nineteen foundation models from sixteen teams were evaluated using a standardized containerized pipeline. Results show that (a) self-supervised pretraining improves generalization on clinical data under domain shift, with the strongest models trained out-of-domain surpassing supervised baselines trained in-domain. (b) No single pretraining objective benefits all tasks: MAE favors segmentation, hybrid reconstruction-contrastive objectives favor classification, and (c) strong performance was achieved by small pretrained models, and improvements from scaling model size and training duration did not yield reliable benefits.

Asbjørn Munk, Stefano Cerri, Vardan Nersesjan +81

Medical Imaging Foundation ModelsSelf-Supervised Pre-TrainingDomain GeneralizationMedical Image BenchmarksFew-Shot Medical Image Segmentation
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Apr 13, 2026

BRIDGE and TCH-Net: Heterogeneous Benchmark and Multi-Branch Baseline for Cross-Domain IoT Botnet Detection

IoT botnet detection has advanced, yet most published systems are validated on a single dataset and rarely generalise across environments. Heterogeneous feature spaces make multi-dataset training practically impossible without discarding semantic interpretability or introducing data integrity violations. No prior work has addressed both problems with a formally specified, reproducible methodology. This paper does. We introduce BRIDGE (Benchmark Reference for IoT Domain Generalisation Evaluation), the first formally specified heterogeneous multi-dataset benchmark for IoT intrusion detection, unifying CICIDS-2017, CIC-IoT-2023, Bot-IoT, Edge-IIoTset, and N-BaIoT through a 46-feature semantic canonical vocabulary grounded in CICFlowMeter nomenclature, with genuine-equivalence-only feature mapping, explicit zero-filling, and per-dataset coverage from 15% to 93%. A leave-one-dataset-out (LODO) protocol makes the generalisation gap precisely measurable: all five evaluated architectures achieve mean LODO F1 between 0.39 and 0.47, and we establish the first community generalisation baseline at mean LODO F1 = 0.5577, a result that shifts the agenda from single-benchmark optimisation toward cross-environment generalisation. We propose TCH-Net, a multi-branch network fusing a three-path Temporal branch (residual convolutional-BiGRU, stride-downsampled BiGRU, pre-LayerNorm Transformer), a provenance-conditioned Contextual branch, and a Statistical branch via Cross-Branch Gated Attention Fusion (CB-GAF) with learnable sigmoid gates for dynamic feature-wise mixing. Across five random seeds, TCH-Net achieves F1 = 0.8296 +/- 0.0028, AUC = 0.9380 +/- 0.0025, and MCC = 0.6972 +/- 0.0056, outperforming all twelve baselines (p < 0.05, Wilcoxon) and recording the highest LODO F1 overall. BRIDGE and the full pipeline are at https://github.com/Ammar-ss/TCH-Net.

Ammar Bhilwarawala, Likhamba Rongmei, Harsh Sharma +4

School of Computer Engineering, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT), Bhubaneswar, Odisha 751024, India

IoT Intrusion DetectionDomain GeneralizationModular Neural Networks
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