An enhanced meta-learning network with sensitivity penalty for cross-domain few-shot fault diagnosis

Abstract Big data-driven rotating machine intelligent diagnostic technology has gained widespread applications. In practice, however, fault data are limited as well as inconsistencies in fault categories among different domains are widespread. These make developing robust intelligent diagnostic models a challenge. To this end, this paper develops an enhanced meta-learning network with a sensitivity penalization mechanism (EMLN-SP) for few-shot fault diagnosis in severe domain bias. First, lightweight channel attention is introduced to establish an enhanced feature encoder under meta-learning framework, which elevates the key feature expression to facilitate the extraction of generalized diagnostic knowledge within limited samples. Second, a boundary-enhanced loss calculation method is designed, which boosts the focus for decision boundary information to prevent the model from the overfitting dilemma in the case of few-shot. Finally, a sensitivity penalty mechanism is constructed to adjust the optimization direction, which prevents the model from falling into a local optimum, to boost the generalization of the model performance. The effectiveness of EMLN-SP is validated by three cross-domain diagnostic cases with diverse domain offsets.