Few-Shot Federated Learning: A Federated Learning Model for Small-Sample Scenarios

Traditional federated learning relies heavily on mature datasets, which typically consist of large volumes of uniformly distributed data. While acquiring extensive datasets is relatively straightforward in academic research, it becomes prohibitively expensive in practical applications, especially in emerging or specialized medical fields characterized by data scarcity. This poses a significant challenge. To address this issue, our study introduces a federated learning model that integrates few-shot learning techniques and is complemented by personalized knowledge distillation to further enhance the model’s classification accuracy. This innovative approach significantly reduces the dependence on large-scale datasets, enabling efficient model training under limited data conditions. Our experimental evaluations conducted on small-scale datasets, including Omniglot, FC100, and mini-ImageNet, indicate that our model surpasses existing state-of-the-art federated learning models in terms of accuracy, achieving a substantial improvement. Specifically, on the FC100 dataset, the classification accuracy of the conventional federated learning algorithm FedAvg was merely 19.6%, whereas the method proposed in this study achieved a classification accuracy of 41%, representing an improvement of more than double. This advancement not only highlights our model’s superiority in alleviating the challenges of limited data availability, but also expands the applicability of federated learning to a broader range of applications.