Learning Domain-Invariant Prompts and Visual Representations for Cross-Domain Scene Classification

Cross-domain scene classification aims to mitigate the distribution discrepancy between domains through domain adaptation techniques. With the rapid advancement of Vision–Language Models (VLMs), utilizing them for cross-domain scene classification has emerged as a promising research direction. Current methods utilize domain-specific prompts to facilitate domain adaptation through the CLIP model. However, for remote sensing images, the considerable differences in visual features across domains pose significant challenges for learning domain-specific prompts, leading to suboptimal cross-domain performance. In addition, they cannot reduce the domain shift that exists between the source domain and the target domain. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel cross-domain scene classification method, DIPVR (Domain-Invariant Prompts and Visual Representations), which enhances model performance by learning domain-invariant features for both prompts and visual representations. Specifically, we propose learning domain-invariant prompts and introducing prior knowledge to guide the prompt-learning process. To learn domain-invariant visual representations, we propose a Visual Invariant Learning module that adaptively extracts the shared features between the source and target domains. Finally, visual features are matched with context features to align the domain distributions between the source and target domains. The experimental results on the cross-domain scene classification datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the baseline methods, achieving optimal cross-domain transfer performance.