SEN: A Novel Feature Normalization Dissimilarity Measure for Prototypical Few-Shot Learning Networks

Accurate identification of pathogenic bacteria from images taken under light microscopy is an important role in clinical diagnosis and microbiology. Traditional deep learning methods such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved excellent performance but are based on enormous, well-annotated datasets that may not be readily available. Absence of labeled images of bacteria is one of the key challenges in real-world applications, where class imbalance and diversity of samples affect generalization. Recent years have witnessed few-shot learning being a potential paradigm for mitigating data paucity by enabling models to learn well from sparse samples. Among numerous few-shot approaches, prototypical networks have proven useful for image classification with sparse data. This paper overviews the progress in bacterial identification from light microscopy images, reviews existing classical and deep learning methods, and highlights how prototypical networks solve the shortcomings of conventional models through few-shot learning. The review concludes with open problems and future directions, including integrating fewshot learning into web-based, scalable diagnostic platforms for efficient pathogen detection.

Facial skin type analysis is a critical task in several fields, including dermatology, cosmetics, and biometrics, and has been the subject of significant research in recent years. Traditional facial skin type analysis approaches rely on large, labeled datasets, which can be time-consuming and costly to collect. This study proposes a novel few-shot learning (FSL) approach for facial skin type analysis that can accurately classify skin types with limited labeled data. A diverse dataset of facial images with varying skin tones and conditions was curated. The proposed approach leverages pre-trained deep neural networks and an FSL algorithm based on prototypical networks (PNs) and matching networks (MNs) to address the challenge of limited labeled data. Importantly, this study has significant implications for improving access to dermatological care, especially in underserved populations, as many individuals are unaware of their skin type, which can lead to ineffective or even harmful skincare practices. Our approach can help individuals quickly determine their skin type and develop a personalized skincare routine based on their unique skin characteristics. The results of our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. PNs achieved the highest accuracy in the 2-way, 10-shot, 15-query scenario with an accuracy of 95.78 ± 2.79%, while MNs achieved the highest accuracy of 90.33 ± 4.10% in the 2-way, 5-shot, 10-query scenario. In conclusion, this study highlights the potential of FSL and deep neural networks to overcome the limitations of traditional approaches to facial skin analysis, offering a promising avenue for future research in this field.

Facial skin type analysis is a critical task in several fields, including dermatology, cosmetics, and biometrics, and has been the subject of significant research in recent years. Traditional facial skin type analysis approaches rely on large, labeled datasets, which can be time-consuming and costly to collect. This study proposes a novel few-shot learning (FSL) approach for facial skin type analysis that can accurately classify skin types with limited labeled data. A diverse dataset of facial images with varying skin tones and conditions was curated. The proposed approach leverages pre-trained deep neural networks and an FSL algorithm based on prototypical networks (PNs) and matching networks (MNs) to address the challenge of limited labeled data. Importantly, this study has significant implications for improving access to dermatological care, especially in underserved populations, as many individuals are unaware of their skin type, which can lead to ineffective or even harmful skincare practices. Our approach can help individuals quickly determine their skin type and develop a personalized skincare routine based on their unique skin characteristics. The results of our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. PNs achieved the highest accuracy in the 2-way, 10-shot, 15-query scenario with an accuracy of 95.78 ± 2.79%, while MNs achieved the highest accuracy of 90.33 ± 4.10% in the 2-way, 5-shot, 10-query scenario. In conclusion, this study highlights the potential of FSL and deep neural networks to overcome the limitations of traditional approaches to facial skin analysis, offering a promising avenue for future research in this field.

Plant and crop production plays a vital role in the overall development of any country. Sugarcane is one of the most produced crops in Australia. Sugarcane plants are vulnerable to various leaf diseases. Early leaf disease detection is crucial for agricultural productivity. Traditional machine learning often relies on handcrafted features, struggles with high-dimensional data, and has scalability issues. Deep learning models overcomes these problems, still there are some challenges, such as the overfitting issue, the need for a large dataset, and less adaptability to new classes. This research addresses the challenge of limited dataset availability of sugarcane leaf diseases by employing few shot learning (FSL) and episodic training. This research proposes a Prototypical Network (PN) based few-shot learning technique to classify sugarcane leaf diseases. The proposed technique uses pretrained deep learning models for feature extraction, such as MobileNet, ResNet, EfficientNet, and PN based FSL to learn from fewer training examples. The experimental results show that the PN with a backbone of ResNet achieved the highest test accuracy of 87 %. The analysis of the experimental results indicates that PN based few shot learning with deep learning models as backbone outperforms standalone pre-trained deep learning models while using limited number of sugarcane images.

SAPENet: Self-Attention based Prototype Enhancement Network for Few-shot Learning

IntroductionKnee injuries, especially Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) tears and meniscus tears, are becoming increasingly common and can severely restrict mobility and quality of life. Early diagnosis is essential for effective treatment and for preventing long-term complications such as knee osteoarthritis. While deep learning approaches have shown promise in identifying knee injuries from MRI scans, they often require large amounts of labeled data, which can be both scarce and privacy-sensitive.MethodsThis paper analyses a hybrid methodology that integrates few-shot learning with federated learning for the diagnosis of knee injuries using MRI scans. The proposed model used a 3DResNet50 architecture as the backbone to enhance both feature extraction and embedding representation. A combined Centralized and Federated Few-Shot Learning Framework is analysed to leverage episodic-intermittent training strategy based on Prototypical Networks. The model is trained incorporating Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), Cross-Entropy Loss, and a MultiStep Learning Rate scheduler to enhance few-shot classification. This model also addressed the challenge of limited annotated data ensuring patient data privacy through distributed learning across multiple regions.ResultsThe models performance was evaluated on the MRNet dataset for multi-label classification. In the centralized setting, the model achieved accuracies of 85.3% on axial views, 82.1% on sagittal views, and 71% on coronal views. The propose work attained accuracies as 83% (axial), 83.9% (sagittal), and 65% (coronal), demonstrating the framework’s effectiveness across different learning configurations.DiscussionThe proposed method outperforms in diagnostic accuracy, generalization across MRI planes, and patient privacy via federated learning. However, it faces limitations, including lower coronal view performance and high computational demands due to its complex architecture.

ABSTRACTBreast cancer (BC) detection based on mammogram images is still an open issue, particularly when there is little annotated data. Combining few‐shot learning (FSL) with transfer learning (TL) has been identified as a potential solution to overcome this problem due to its ability to learn from a few examples while producing robust features for classification. The objective of this study is to use and analyze FSL integrated with TL to enhance the classification accuracy and generalization ability in a limited dataset. The proposed approach integrates the FSL models (prototypical networks, matching networks, and relation networks) with the TL procedures. The models are trained using a small set of samples with annotation and can be assessed using various performance metrics. The models were trained and compared to the TL and the state‐of‐the‐art methods regarding accuracy, precision, recall, F1‐score, and area under the ROC curve (AUC). The models proved to be effective when integrated, and the relation networks model was the most accurate, with an accuracy of 95.6% and an AUC of 0.970. The models provided higher accuracy, recall, and F1‐scores, especially in the case of discerning between normal, benign, and malignant cases, as compared to TL traditional techniques and the various recent state‐of‐the‐art techniques. This integrated approach gives high efficiency, accuracy, and scalability to the whole BC detection process, and it has potential for further medical imaging domains. Future research will explore hyperparameter tuning and incorporating electronic health record systems to enhance diagnostic precision and individualized care.

The objects in fluorescence microscopy images (FMIs) are rather densely populated, and often have complex structures as well as large color variations. These issues result in time-consuming manual annotations for training a segmentation model. Few-shot segmentation (FSS) models reduce the requirements of annotations by using prototypical networks to generalize the object regions given only a few annotation masks. These methods, however, often fail to generalize to FMIs due to the domain shift from the images of source class to those of target class. To tackle these challenges, we adapt the prototypical networks from the few-shot learning scheme as our base model architecture to learn a compact feature representation of the object, with only a few annotated masks. Then, to solve the domain shift problem, we propose a resampling strategy to regularize the model training. Specifically, we construct the training set using not only the images form the source class, but also the support set from the target class by resampling the latter for regularizing the training. To distinguish our FMIs segmentation method from the conventional FSS models, we define it as a training regularization strategy based on the prototypical networks (TRPN). Experimental results on three public datasets, i.e.the ER, MITO and NUC, have confirmed the advantages of our method, which provides robust and accurate segmentation performance on FMIs only with a few annotation masks. Source code and data of this work are made publicly available at: https://github.com/cbmi-group/TRPN-model.KeywordsFluorescence microscopy images segmentationA few annotationsPrototypical feature learningTraining regularization strategy

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) has gained significant attention in fault diagnosis due to its ability to classify faults with limited labeled data. Metric learning-based approaches, such as prototypical networks, have demonstrated effectiveness in this domain by computing class prototypes from support examples. However, these methods often rely on high-dimensional embeddings, which can lead to computational inefficiencies and overfitting, particularly in low-data regimes. This work introduces the Regularized Embedding Memory Book (REMB), a novel module designed to improve prototype estimation and enhance classification accuracy in FSL for fault diagnosis. The REMB module constructs a memory book of embeddings for each class and refines prototype computation by selecting the most representative embeddings. Additionally, we incorporate a set of regularization techniques to improve generalization and robustness, particularly in noisy environments. We evaluate REMB on four benchmark datasets commonly used in fault diagnosis: CWRU, JNU, PU, and an additional dataset with varying training sample sizes. The experimental results demonstrate that REMB improves classification performance, particularly in low-data scenarios, and enhances model calibration. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of noise adaptation and the contribution of different regularization terms through an ablation study. Our findings suggest that the proposed approach provides a robust and efficient solution for few-shot fault diagnosis, outperforming conventional metric learning methods.

Existing few-shot learning models leverage vision-language pre-trained models to alleviate the data scarcity problem. However, such models usually process visual and text information separately, which causes still inherent disparities between cross-modal features. Therefore, we propose the ProFusion model, which leverages multimodal pre-trained models and prototypical networks to construct multiple prototypes. Specifically, ProFusion generates image and text prototypes symmetrically using the visual encoder and text encoder, while integrating visual and text information through the fusion module to create more expressive multimodal feature fusion prototypes. Additionally, we introduce the alignment module to ensure consistency between image and text prototypes. During inference, ProFusion calculates the similarity of test images to the three types of prototypes separately and applies a weighted sum to generate the final prediction. Experiments demonstrate that ProFusion performs outstanding classification tasks on 15 benchmark datasets.

Solving machine learning problems with small-scale training datasets becomes an emergent research area to fill the opposite end of big data applications. Attention is drawn to malware detection using few-shot learning, which is typically formulated as N-way K-shot problems. The aims are to reduce the effort in data collection, learn the rare cases, reduce the model complexity, and increase the accuracy of the detection model. The performance of the malware detection model is analyzed with the variation in the number of ways and the number of shots. This facilitates the understanding on the design and formulation of three algorithms namely relation network, prototypical network, and relation network for N-way K-shot problems. Two benchmark datasets are selected for the performance evaluation. Results reveal the general characteristics of the performance of malware detection model with fixed ways and varying shots, and varying ways and fixed shots based on the trends of results of 30 scenarios. KeywordsFew-shot learningImbalanced datasetMalware detectionN-way K-shotSmall-scale dataset

Recently, due to the increasing requirements of medical imaging applications and the professional requirements of annotating medical images, few-shot learning has gained increasing attention in the medical image semantic segmentation field. To perform segmentation with limited number of labeled medical images, most existing studies use Prototypical Networks (PN) and have obtained compelling success. However, these approaches overlook the query imagefeatures extracted from the proposed representation network, failing to preserving the spatial connection between query and support images. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised few-shot medical image segmentation network and introduce a novel Cycle-Resemblance Attention (CRA) module to fully leverage the pixel-wise relation between query and support medical images. Notably, we first line up multiple attention blocks to refine more abundant relation information. Then, we present CRAPNet by integrating the CRA module with a classic prototype network, where pixel-wise relations between query and support features are well recaptured for segmentation. Extensive experiments on two different medical image datasets, e.g., abdomen MRI and abdomen CT, demonstrate the superiority of our model over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Several recent studies on dyadic human-human interactions have been done on conversations without specific business objectives. However, many companies might benefit from studies dedicated to more precise environments such as after sales services or customer satisfaction surveys. In this work, we place ourselves in the scope of a live chat customer service in which we want to detect emotions and their evolution in the conversation flow. This context leads to multiple challenges that range from exploiting restricted, small and mostly unlabeled datasets to finding and adapting methods for such context. We tackle these challenges by using Few-Shot Learning while making the hypothesis it can serve conversational emotion classification for different languages and sparse labels. We contribute by proposing a variation of Prototypical Networks for sequence labeling in conversation that we name ProtoSeq. We test this method on two datasets with different languages: daily conversations in English and customer service chat conversations in French. When applied to emotion classification in conversations, our method proved to be competitive even when compared to other ones.

Nowadays, the request for quality is increasing more than before, but defective products are found and cannot be prevented during the manufacturing process. Therefore, the defective products are abandoned. However, since each of the defects is not caused by the same process, which needs the manufacturing process to be optimized to reduce the occurrence of defective products. Therefore, manufacturers require an inspection process that provides immediate results. Therefore, using the Prototypical network using with few-shot learning on the bagel dataset, the effect of surface defect detection on 3D objects is proposed with its optimized accuracy in this study.

Hospitalized patients sometimes have complex health conditions, such as multiple diseases, underlying diseases, and complications. The heterogeneous patient conditions may have various representations. A generalized model ignores the differences among heterogeneous patients, and personalized models, even with transfer learning, are still limited to the small amount of training data and the repeated training process. Meta-learning provides a solution for training similar patients based on few-shot learning; however, cannot address common cross-domain patients. Inspired by prototypical networks [1], we proposed a meta-prototype for Electronic Health Records (EHR), a meta-learning-based model with flexible prototypes representing the heterogeneity in patients. We apply this technique to cardiovascular diseases in MIMIC-III and compare it against a set of benchmark models, and demonstrate its ability to address heterogeneous patient health conditions and improve the model performances from 1.2% to 11.9% on different metrics and prediction tasks.Clinical relevance- Developing an adaptive EHR risk prediction model for outcomes-driven phenotyping of heterogeneous patient health conditions.