Few-Shot Automatic Modulation Classification Using Architecture Search and Knowledge Transfer in Radar–Communication Coexistence Scenarios

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) holds a significant position in physical-layer security, offering an innovative method to enhance the security of data transmission and anti-interference ability. Recently, deep learning (DL) has seen extensive application in radar and communication signal classification, which requires sufficient labeled training data to ensure great classification performance. However, obtaining a significant amount of labeled samples is extremely challenging in complex and ever-changing electromagnetic environments. Therefore, we propose a novel few-shot AMC method using architecture search and knowledge transfer. This method first utilizes an advanced neural architecture search algorithm, $\Lambda $ -DARTS, to automatically search for the optimal network structure (i.e., Auto-MCNet) based on the auxiliary sample set. Then, the Auto-MCNet model is pretrained on the auxiliary data set to explore prior knowledge about signal classification. Finally, we transfer the knowledge to a few-shot training data set and fine-tune the Auto-MCNet model to enhance its generalization ability. The simulation results indicate that when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is greater than 0 dB and the shot of each class is 3 and 10, the average accuracy of the proposed Auto-MCNet is higher than 81% and 90%, respectively. Moreover, compared to advanced competitors, Auto-MCNet achieves higher classification performance with lower model complexity.