Flatness-Aware Minimization for Domain Generalization

Abstract

Domain generalization (DG) seeks to learn robust models that generalize well under unknown distribution shifts. As a critical aspect of DG, optimizer selection has not been explored in depth. Currently, most DG methods follow the widely used benchmark, DomainBed, and utilize Adam as the default optimizer for all datasets. However, we reveal that Adam is not necessarily the optimal choice for the majority of current DG methods and datasets. Based on the perspective of loss landscape flatness, we propose a novel approach, Flatness-Aware Minimization for Domain Generalization (FAD), which can efficiently optimize both zeroth-order and first-order flatness simultaneously for DG. We provide theoretical analyses of the FAD’s out-ofdistribution (OOD) generalization error and convergence. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of FAD on various DG datasets.