Multiple Domain Experts Collaborative Learning: Multi-Source Domain Generalization For Person Re-Identification

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in person re-identification (ReID). However, current ReID approaches still suffer from considerable performance degradation when unseen testing domains exhibit different characteristics from the source training ones, known as the domain generalization problem. Given multiple source training domains, previous Domain Generalizable ReID (DG-ReID) methods usually learn all domains together using a shared network, which can't learn sufficient knowledge from each domain. In this paper, we propose a novel Multiple Domain Experts Collaborative Learning (MECL) framework for better exploiting all training domains, which benefits from the proposed Domain-Domain Collaborative Learning (DDCL) and Universal-Domain Collaborative Learning (UDCL). DDCL utilizes domain-specific experts for fully exploiting each domain, and prevents experts from over-fitting the corresponding domain using a meta-learning strategy. In UDCL, a universal expert supervises the learning of domain experts and continuously gathers knowledge from all domain experts. Note, only the universal expert will be used for inference. Extensive experiments on DG-ReID benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DDCL and UDCL, and show that the whole MECL framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts. Experimental results on DG-classification benchmarks also reveal the great potential of applying MECL to other DG tasks.