ProtoFed: Prototype-Enhanced Federated Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis

Rolling bearing fault diagnosis is essential for ensuring the safety and reliability of rotating machinery. Although deep learning-based methods have achieved promising performance, they usually require sufficient labeled data, which is difficult to obtain in practical industrial scenarios where fault samples are scarce and data sharing across sites is restricted by privacy and confidentiality constraints. Federated learning enables collaborative model training without transmitting raw data, but existing federated fault diagnosis methods often degrade under few-shot conditions. Moreover, current federated meta-learning approaches mainly focus on model-level adaptation and lack explicit class-level representation alignment, leading to prototype drift across heterogeneous operating conditions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes ProtoFed, a prototype-enhanced federated meta-learning framework for few-shot rolling bearing fault diagnosis. ProtoFed converts raw vibration signals into time–frequency representations using continuous wavelet transform and performs local episodic learning with prototypical networks. A Global Prototype Calibration mechanism aggregates local class prototypes into stable global prototypes with exponential moving average smoothing, while a Prototype-Distance Aware Aggregation strategy adaptively adjusts client aggregation weights according to local–global prototype divergence. Experiments on the CWRU and Paderborn University bearing datasets under non-IID 5-shot and 10-shot settings show that ProtoFed consistently outperforms standard federated learning, prototype-based federated learning, and federated meta-learning baselines. Under the 5-shot setting, ProtoFed achieves 95.63% and 91.35% accuracy on CWRU and PU, respectively, approaching centralized few-shot upper-bound performance while preserving the federated training paradigm.