Few-shot Learning Method Research Articles

Few-shot bioacoustic event detection utilizing spectro-temporal receptive field

Bioacoustic event detection is a task of identifying specific animal sounds within a biological audio recordings. Specialists only can label temporal information of animal sounds since knowledge for biological sound is demanded for labeling and they can give only few annotations due to high labor intensity caused by large duration of biological recordings. Therefore, the task is set to few-shot learning scheme and method called prototypical network effectively deal with the few-shot learning scheme by learning representation space which represent each class for given few examples. In this work, we utilized spectro-temporal receptive field, which is inspired auditory cortex which responses actively to certain spectro-temporal modulation, as a convolutional layer kernel of prototypical network. Bioacoustic events retain plentiful spectro-temporal modulation that STRF is expected to capture animal sounds effectively. Also, STRF kernels are constructed to fixed shape rather than trained that a model utilizing STRF kernels would learn representation space with less parameter. We built a model called Two Branch STRFNet (TB-STRFNet), in which STRF branch captures spectro-temporal modulation by STRF kernels and the other branch captures detailed time-frequency information which can be smashed in STRF branch. TB-STRFNet outperformed other models showing that effectiveness of auditory system inspired method.

Semantic Guided prototype learning for Cross-Domain Few-Shot hyperspectral image classification

Hyperspectral image(HSI) classification has found extensive application in the field of remote sensing. However, traditional HSI classification methods typically rely on a large number of labeled samples, incurring significant costs and requiring considerable time and effort for acquisition. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel cross-domain few-shot learning method termed Semantic Guided Prototype Learning (SGPL), which aims to optimize prototype learning through the incorporation semantic information, thereby enhancing the classification accuracy of hyperspectral images in few-shot scenarios. The core idea of the SGPL method is to integrate semantic information into the prototype learning framework, thereby enhancing the expressive capacity of each category prototype. Specifically, HSI category labels are encoded via one-hot encoding, and the corresponding HSI features are concatenated with these encoded vectors to construct an augmented feature representation. These augmented feature vectors are subsequently fed into a prototype generator, which is designed to learn the generation of category prototypes from the concatenated features. Through the application of one-hot encoding and feature concatenation, SGPL effectively captures and leverages discriminative information between classes. Moreover, the proposed model exhibits superior performance on three different HSI datasets: Salinas, the University of Pavia(UP), and Indian Pines(IP) with overall classification accuracies of 91.27%, 85.84%, and 69.33%, respectively, outperforming other methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/AIYAU/SGPL.

Few-shot learning with representative global prototype

Few-shot learning is often challenged by low generalization performance due to the model is mostly learned with the base classes only. To mitigate the above issues, a few-shot learning method with representative global prototype is proposed in this paper. Specifically, to enhance generalization to novel class, we propose a strategy for jointly training base and novel classes. This process produces prototypes characterizing the class information called representative global prototypes. Additionally, to avoid the problem of data imbalance and prototype bias caused by newly added categories of sparse samples, a novel sample synthesis method is proposed for augmenting more representative samples of novel class. Finally, representative samples and non-representative samples with high uncertainty are selected to enhance the representational and discriminative abilities of the global prototype. Intensive experiments have been conducted on two popular benchmark datasets, and the experimental results show that this method significantly improves the classification ability of few-shot learning tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Few-shot learning to identify atypical endometrial hyperplasia and endometrial cancer based on transvaginal ultrasonic images

ObjectiveIt is challenging to accurately distinguish atypical endometrial hyperplasia (AEH) and endometrial cancer (EC) under routine transvaginal ultrasonic (TVU) detection. Our research aims to use the few-shot learning (FSL) method to identify non-atypical endometrial hyperplasia (NAEH), AEH, and EC based on limited TVU images. MethodsThe TVU images of pathologically confirmed NAEH, AEH, and EC patients (n = 33 per class) were split into the support set (SS, n = 3 per class) and the query set (QS, n = 30 per class). Next, we used dual pretrained ResNet50 V2 which pretrained on ImageNet first and then on extra collected TVU images to extract 1*64 eigenvectors from the TVU images in SS and QS. Then, the Euclidean distances were calculated between each TVU image in QS and nine TVU images of SS. Finally, the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm was used to diagnose the TVU images in QS. ResultsThe overall accuracy and macro precision of the proposed FSL model in QS were 0.878 and 0.882 respectively, superior to the automated machine learning models, traditional ResNet50 V2 model, junior sonographer, and senior sonographer. When identifying EC, the proposed FSL model achieved the highest precision of 0.964, the highest recall of 0.900, and the highest F1-score of 0.931. ConclusionsThe proposed FSL model combining dual pretrained ResNet50 V2 eigenvectors extractor and KNN classifier presented well in identifying NAEH, AEH, and EC patients with limited TVU images, showing potential in the application of computer-aided disease diagnosis.

Property-Aware Relation Networks for Few-Shot Molecular Property Prediction.

Molecular property prediction plays a fundamental role in AI-aided drug discovery to identify candidate molecules, which is also essentially a few-shot problem due to lack of labeled data. In this paper, we propose Property-Aware Relation networks (PAR) to handle this problem. We first introduce a property-aware molecular encoder to transform the generic molecular embeddings to property-aware ones. Then, we design a query-dependent relation graph learning module to estimate molecular relation graph and refine molecular embeddings w.r.t. the target property. Thus, the facts that both property-related information and relationships among molecules change across different properties are utilized to better learn and propagate molecular embeddings. Generally, PAR can be regarded as a combination of metric-based and optimization-based few-shot learning method. We further extend PAR to Transferable PAR (T-PAR) to handle the distribution shift, which is common in drug discovery. The keys are joint sampling and relation graph learning schemes, which simultaneously learn molecular embeddings from both source and target domains. Extensive results on benchmark datasets show that PAR and T-PAR consistently outperform existing methods on few-shot and transferable few-shot molecular property prediction tasks, respectively. Besides, ablation and case studies are conducted to validate the rationality of our designs in PAR and T-PAR.

A novel transformer-based few-shot learning method for intelligent fault diagnosis with noisy labels under varying working conditions

Recent years have witnessed the success of Few-shot Learning (FSL) methods in equipment reliability enhancement and fault diagnosis, by virtue of learning from limited data and adapting to new operating conditions. However, due to sensor bias, manual collection, and mislabeling, label noise is inevitably introduced into the dataset, which further reduces the quality of supervised information contained in the few-shot dataset, posing significant challenges for accurate fault diagnosis. In this paper, the problem of Few-shot Fault Diagnosis with Noisy Labels (FFDNL) is studied for the first time, and a novel method named Enhanced Transformer with Asymmetric Loss Function (ETALF) is proposed. ETALF leverages the self-attention mechanism of the transformer to dynamically measure the similarity between fault samples in the support set to enhance the model's robustness against label noise, then naturally aggregates the similar samples into corresponding correct prototypes. Furthermore, an asymmetric loss function is designed, which adaptively assigns the model with larger penalties for incorrect category predictions and smaller penalties for correct category predictions, thereby enhancing fault diagnostic performance through inherent asymmetry. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets, and the compared results with representative approaches validate the effectiveness of our proposed ETALF in performing intelligent fault diagnosis using limited and noise-labeled data under varying working conditions, which achieves accuracies of 97.77% and 95.78% with 0.2 noisy-level labels during meta-training and meta-testing on the CWRU and KAIST datasets, respectively.

Extracting Geoscientific Dataset Names from the Literature Based on the Hierarchical Temporal Memory Model

Extracting geoscientific dataset names from the literature is crucial for building a literature–data association network, which can help readers access the data quickly through the Internet. However, the existing named-entity extraction methods have low accuracy in extracting geoscientific dataset names from unstructured text because geoscientific dataset names are a complex combination of multiple elements, such as geospatial coverage, temporal coverage, scale or resolution, theme content, and version. This paper proposes a new method based on the hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) model, a brain-inspired neural network with superior performance in high-level cognitive tasks, to accurately extract geoscientific dataset names from unstructured text. First, a word-encoding method based on the Unicode values of characters for the HTM model was proposed. Then, over 12,000 dataset names were collected from geoscience data-sharing websites and encoded into binary vectors to train the HTM model. We conceived a new classifier scheme for the HTM model that decodes the predictive vector for the encoder of the next word so that the similarity of the encoders of the predictive next word and the real next word can be computed. If the similarity is greater than a specified threshold, the real next word can be regarded as part of the name, and a successive word set forms the full geoscientific dataset name. We used the trained HTM model to extract geoscientific dataset names from 100 papers. Our method achieved an F1-score of 0.727, outperforming the GPT-4- and Claude-3-based few-shot learning (FSL) method, with F1-scores of 0.698 and 0.72, respectively.

Reshaping Bioacoustics Event Detection: Leveraging Few-Shot Learning (FSL) with Transductive Inference and Data Augmentation.

Bioacoustic event detection is a demanding endeavor involving recognizing and classifying the sounds animals make in their natural habitats. Traditional supervised learning requires a large amount of labeled data, which are hard to come by in bioacoustics. This paper presents a few-shot learning (FSL) method incorporating transductive inference and data augmentation to address the issues of too few labeled events and small volumes of recordings. Here, transductive inference iteratively alters class prototypes and feature extractors to seize essential patterns, whereas data augmentation applies SpecAugment on Mel spectrogram features to augment training data. The proposed approach is evaluated by using the Detecting and Classifying Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2022 and 2021 datasets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that all components of the proposed method achieve significant F-score improvements of 27% and 10%, for the DCASE-2022 and DCASE-2021 datasets, respectively, compared to recent advanced approaches. Moreover, our method is helpful in FSL tasks because it effectively adapts to sounds from various animal species, recordings, and durations.

Medical Tumor Image Classification Based on Few-Shot Learning.

As a high mortality disease, cancer seriously affects people's life and well-being. Reliance on pathologists to assess disease progression from pathological images is inaccurate and burdensome. Computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system can effectively assist diagnosis and make more credible decisions. However, a large number of labeled medical images that contribute to improve the accuracy of machine learning algorithm, especially for deep learning in CAD, are difficult to collect. Therefore, in this work, an improved few-shot learning method is proposed for medical image recognition. In addition, to make full use of the limited feature information in one or more samples, a feature fusion strategy is involved in our model. On the dataset of BreakHis and skin lesions, the experimental results show that our model achieved the classification accuracy of 91.22% and 71.20% respectively when only 10 labeled samples are given, which is superior to other state-of-the-art methods.

A Survey of Developments in Federated Meta-Learning

Federated meta-learning is a widely used few-shot learning method and has a very good development prospect. Federated meta-learning combines the characteristics of federated learning and meta-learning. It can not only use the data of each client while protecting its privacy to a certain extent, but also solve the problem of data volume that requires a large amount of data for model training in machine learning. With the rise of big data technology and edge computing, federated meta-learning technology has become a research hotspot in machine learning. In this paper, we provide an overview of the development of federated meta-learning and point out the relationship between federated learning, meta-learning and federated learning. Finally, some existing problems in federated meta-learning are pointed out, which provides ideas for the subsequent research on federated meta-learning.

A Novel Fault Diagnosis Method of High-Speed Train Based on Few-Shot Learning.

Ensuring the safe and stable operation of high-speed trains necessitates real-time monitoring and diagnostics of their suspension systems. While machine learning technology is widely employed for industrial equipment fault diagnosis, its effective application relies on the availability of a large dataset with annotated fault data for model training. However, in practice, the availability of informational data samples is often insufficient, with most of them being unlabeled. The challenge arises when traditional machine learning methods encounter a scarcity of training data, leading to overfitting due to limited information. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel few-shot learning method for high-speed train fault diagnosis, incorporating sensor-perturbation injection and meta-confidence learning to improve detection accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method, which introduces perturbations, compared to existing methods. The impact of perturbation effects and class numbers on fault detection is analyzed, confirming the effectiveness of our learning strategy.

Data-efficient multimodal human action recognition for proactive human–robot collaborative assembly: A cross-domain few-shot learning approach

With the recent vision of Industry 5.0, the cognitive capability of robots plays a crucial role in advancing proactive human–robot collaborative assembly. As a basis of the mutual empathy, the understanding of a human operator’s intention has been primarily studied through the technique of human action recognition. Existing deep learning-based methods demonstrate remarkable efficacy in handling information-rich data such as physiological measurements and videos, where the latter category represents a more natural perception input. However, deploying these methods in new unseen assembly scenarios requires first collecting abundant case-specific data. This leads to significant manual effort and poor flexibility. To deal with the issue, this paper proposes a novel cross-domain few-shot learning method for data-efficient multimodal human action recognition. A hierarchical data fusion mechanism is designed to jointly leverage the skeletons, RGB images and depth maps with complementary information. Then a temporal CrossTransformer is developed to enable the action recognition with very limited amount of data. Lightweight domain adapters are integrated to further improve the generalization with fast finetuning. Extensive experiments on a real car engine assembly case show the superior performance of proposed method over state-of-the-art regarding both accuracy and finetuning efficiency. Real-time demonstrations and ablation study further indicate the potential of early recognition, which is beneficial for the robot procedures generation in practical applications. In summary, this paper contributes to the rarely explored realm of data-efficient human action recognition for proactive human–robot collaboration.

A Few-Shot Learning Method for Nonintrusive Load Monitoring With V–I Trajectory Features

A Few-Shot Learning Method for Nonintrusive Load Monitoring With <i>V</i>–<i>I</i> Trajectory Features

A few-shot learning method for tobacco abnormality identification.

Tobacco is a valuable crop, but its disease identification is rarely involved in existing works. In this work, we use few-shot learning (FSL) to identify abnormalities in tobacco. FSL is a solution for the data deficiency that has been an obstacle to using deep learning. However, weak feature representation caused by limited data is still a challenging issue in FSL. The weak feature representation leads to weak generalization and troubles in cross-domain. In this work, we propose a feature representation enhancement network (FREN) that enhances the feature representation through instance embedding and task adaptation. For instance embedding, global max pooling, and global average pooling are used together for adding more features, and Gaussian-like calibration is used for normalizing the feature distribution. For task adaptation, self-attention is adopted for task contextualization. Given the absence of publicly available data on tobacco, we created a tobacco leaf abnormality dataset (TLA), which includes 16 categories, two settings, and 1,430 images in total. In experiments, we use PlantVillage, which is the benchmark dataset for plant disease identification, to validate the superiority of FREN first. Subsequently, we use the proposed method and TLA to analyze and discuss the abnormality identification of tobacco. For the multi-symptom diseases that always have low accuracy, we propose a solution by dividing the samples into subcategories created by symptom. For the 10 categories of tomato in PlantVillage, the accuracy achieves 66.04% in 5-way, 1-shot tasks. For the two settings of the tobacco leaf abnormality dataset, the accuracies were achieved at 45.5% and 56.5%. By using the multisymptom solution, the best accuracy can be lifted to 60.7% in 16-way, 1-shot tasks and achieved at 81.8% in 16-way, 10-shot tasks. The results show that our method improves the performance greatly by enhancing feature representation, especially for tasks that contain categories with high similarity. The desensitization of data when crossing domains also validates that the FREN has a strong generalization ability.

Diagnosis of Glaucoma Based on Few-Shot Learning with Wide-Field Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography.

This study evaluated the utility of incorporating deep learning into the relatively novel imaging technique of wide-field optical coherence tomography angiography (WF-OCTA) for glaucoma diagnosis. To overcome the challenge of limited data associated with this emerging imaging, the application of few-shot learning (FSL) was explored, and the advantages observed during its implementation were examined. A total of 195 eyes, comprising 82 normal controls and 113 patients with glaucoma, were examined in this study. The system was trained using FSL instead of traditional supervised learning. Model training can be presented in two distinct ways. Glaucoma feature detection was performed using ResNet18 as a feature extractor. To implement FSL, the ProtoNet algorithm was utilized to perform task-independent classification. Using this trained model, the performance of WF-OCTA through the FSL technique was evaluated. We trained the WF-OCTA validation method with 10 normal and 10 glaucoma images and subsequently examined the glaucoma detection effectiveness. FSL using the WF-OCTA image achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.93 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.912-0.954) and an accuracy of 81%. In contrast, supervised learning using WF-OCTA images produced worse results than FSL, with an AUC of 0.80 (95% CI: 0.778-0.823) and an accuracy of 50% (p-values < 0.05). Furthermore, the FSL method using WF-OCTA images demonstrated improvement over the conventional OCT parameter-based results (all p-values < 0.05). This study demonstrated the effectiveness of applying deep learning to WF-OCTA for glaucoma diagnosis, highlighting the potential of WF-OCTA images in glaucoma diagnostics. Additionally, it showed that FSL could overcome the limitations associated with a small dataset and is expected to be applicable in various clinical settings.

FeatWalk: Enhancing Few-Shot Classification through Local View Leveraging

Few-shot learning is a challenging task due to the limited availability of training samples. Recent few-shot learning studies with meta-learning and simple transfer learning methods have achieved promising performance. However, the feature extractor pre-trained with the upstream dataset may neglect the extraction of certain features which could be crucial for downstream tasks. In this study, inspired by the process of human learning in few-shot tasks, where humans not only observe the whole image (`global view') but also attend to various local image regions (`local view') for comprehensive understanding of detailed features, we propose a simple yet effective few-shot learning method called FeatWalk which can utilize the complementary nature of global and local views, therefore providing an intuitive and effective solution to the problem of insufficient local information extraction from the pre-trained feature extractor. Our method can be easily and flexibly combined with various existing methods, further enhancing few-shot learning performance. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets consistently demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our method.The source code is available at https://github.com/exceefind/FeatWalk.

Tagging Items with Emerging Tags: A Neural Topic Model Based Few-Shot Learning Approach

The tagging system has become a primary tool to organize information resources on the Internet, which benefits both users and the platforms. To build a successful tagging system, automatic tagging methods are desired. With the development of society, new tags keep emerging. The problem of tagging items with emerging tags is an open challenge for an automatic tagging system, and it has not been well studied in the literature. We define this problem as a tag-centered cold-start problem in this study and propose a novel neural topic model based few-shot learning method named NTFSL to solve the problem. In our proposed method, we innovatively fuse the topic modeling task with the few-shot learning task, endowing the model with the capability to infer effective topics to solve the tag-centered cold-start problem with the property of interpretability. Meanwhile, we propose a novel neural topic model for the topic modeling task to improve the quality of inferred topics, which helps enhance the tagging performance. Furthermore, we develop a novel inference method based on the variational auto-encoding framework for model inference. We conducted extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed model compared with state-of-the-art machine learning methods. Case studies also show the interpretability of the model.

Plant disease recognition in a low data scenario using few-shot learning

Plant disease is one of the major problems in agriculture. Diseases damage plants, reduce yields and lower the quality of the produce. Traditional approaches to detecting plant diseases are usually based on visual inspection and laboratory testing, which can be expensive and time-consuming. They require trained plant pathologists as well as specialised equipment. Several studies demonstrate that artificial intelligence (AI) methods can produce promising results. However, AI methods are generally data-hungry and require large annotated datasets, and the collection and annotation of such datasets can be a limiting factor. It often appears that only a small amount of data is available for certain disease types. Whereas the performance of typical AI methods drops significantly when they are trained with inadequate data. This paper proposes a novel few-shot learning (FSL) method to detect plant diseases and alleviate the data scarcity problem. The proposed method uses as few as five images per class in the machine learning process. Our method is based on a state-of-the-art FSL pipeline called pre-training, meta-learning, and fine-tuning (PMF), integrated with a novel feature attention (FA) module; we call the overall method PMF+FA. The FA module emphasises the discriminative parts in the image and reduces the impact of complicated backgrounds and undesired objects. We used ResNet50 and Vision Transformers (ViT) as the feature learner. Two publicly available plant disease datasets were repurposed to meet the FSL requirements. We thoroughly evaluated the proposed method on the PlantDoc dataset, which contains disease samples in field environments with complex backgrounds and unwanted objects. The PMF+FA method with ViT achieved an average accuracy of 90.12% in disease recognition. The results demonstrate that the PMF+FA pipeline consistently outperforms the baseline PMF. The results also highlight that the method using ViT generates better results than ResNet50 for diagnosing complex data. ViT and ResNet50 implementations are computationally efficient, taking 1.11 and 0.57 ms on average per image to evaluate the test set respectively. The high throughput and high-quality performance with only a small training dataset indicate that the proposed technique can be used for real-time disease detection in digital farming systems.

A Metric-Based Few-Shot Learning Method for Fish Species Identification with Limited Samples.

Fish species identification plays a vital role in marine fisheries resource exploration, yet datasets related to marine fish resources are scarce. In open-water environments, various fish species often exhibit similar appearances and sizes. To solve these issues, we propose a few-shot learning approach to identifying fish species. Our approach involves two key components. Firstly, the embedding module was designed to address the challenges posed by a large number of fish species with similar phenotypes by utilizing the distribution relationships of species in the embedding space. Secondly, a metric function was introduced, effectively enhancing the performance of fish species classification and successfully addressing the issue of limited sample quantity. The proposed model is trained end to end on fish species public datasets including the Croatian fish dataset, Fish4Knowledge and WildFish. Compared with the prototypical networks, our method performs more effectively and improves accuracy by 2% to 10%; it is able to identify fish effectively in small samples sizes and complex scene scenarios. This method provides a valuable technological tool for the development of fisheries resources and the preservation of fish biodiversity.

Root Cause Identification of Industrial Alarm Floods Using Word Embedding and Few-Shot Learning

Alarm systems are commonly deployed in modern industrial facilities to monitor process operations. However, due to the presence of nuisance alarms and alarm floods, their efficiencies are much degraded. Especially, alarm floods are among the most difficult issues in industrial alarm management and recognised as the main causes of many industrial accidents. To address alarm floods, this paper proposes a Root Cause Identification method (RCI) for industrial alarm floods based on word embedding and few-shot learning. The contributions are threefold: 1) A textual encoding method based on word embedding is proposed to convert alarm messages into numerical word vectors that can be used in the modeling of RCI; 2) an alarm priority based adaptive weighting strategy is designed to make the RCI more sensitive to alarms of higher priorities and appearing earlier; 3) a few-shot learning method based on the long short-term memory is adapted to identify root causes of alarm floods based on limited instances of labeled data. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method are demonstrated by a case study based on data from the Vinyl Acetate Monomer (VAM) public model.