Domain Adaptation & Domain Generalization Reading List

Curated by Mouhssine Rifaki | Stanford Electrical Engineering | Last updated August 2026

Models that excel in one hospital or simulator often stumble in the next. These papers track the arc from adversarial alignment and moment matching to invariant risk and the hard empirical reality checks that reshaped the field.

Domain Adaptation & Domain Generalization: 10 key papers

1. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation
   Ganin and Lempitsky. arXiv 2014.
2. Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks
   Ganin et al. arXiv 2015.
3. Return of Frustratingly Easy Domain Adaptation
   Sun et al. arXiv 2015.
4. Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation
   Tzeng et al. arXiv 2017.
5. Invariant Risk Minimization
   Arjovsky et al. arXiv 2019.
6. In Search of Lost Domain Generalization
   Gulrajani and Lopez-Paz. arXiv 2020.
7. CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation
   Hoffman et al. arXiv 2017.
8. Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks
   Long et al. arXiv 2015.
9. A Survey on Deep Transfer Learning
   Tan et al. arXiv 2018.
10. Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
    Saito et al. arXiv 2017.

Related reading lists

• Zero-Shot RL & Generalization
• Sim-to-Real Transfer
• Block MDPs & Latent State Discovery
• Meta-Reinforcement Learning
• Optimal Transport for Machine Learning
• AI Alignment & Safety
• Distributional Reinforcement Learning
• Unsupervised Environment Design