Activate and Reject: Towards Safe Domain Generalization under Category
  Shift
Chaoqi Chen Luyao Tang Leitian Tao Hong-Yu Zhou Yue Huang Xiaoguang Han Yizhou Yu
Albeit the notable performance on in-domain test points, it is non-trivial
for deep neural networks to attain satisfactory accuracy when deploying in the
open world, where novel domains and object classes often occur. In this paper,
we study a practical problem of Domain Generalization under Category Shift
(DGCS), which aims to simultaneously detect unknown-class samples and classify
known-class samples in the target domains. Compared to prior DG works, we face
two new challenges: 1) how to learn the concept of ``unknown'' during training
with only source known-class samples, and 2) how to adapt the source-trained
model to unseen environments for safe model deployment. To this end, we propose
a novel Activate and Reject (ART) framework to reshape the model's decision
boundary to accommodate unknown classes and conduct post hoc modification to
further discriminate known and unknown classes using unlabeled test data.
Specifically, during training, we promote the response to the unknown by
optimizing the unknown probability and then smoothing the overall output to
mitigate the overconfidence issue. At test time, we introduce a step-wise
online adaptation method that predicts the label by virtue of the cross-domain
nearest neighbor and class prototype information without updating the network's
parameters or using threshold-based mechanisms. Experiments reveal that ART
consistently improves the generalization capability of deep networks on
different vision tasks. For image classification, ART improves the H-score by
6.1% on average compared to the previous best method. For object detection and
semantic segmentation, we establish new benchmarks and achieve competitive
performance.