Learn to Supervise: Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Prototype Refinement for Few-Shot Motor Fault Diagnosis

Motor fault diagnosis is a fundamental aspect of ensuring the reliability of industrial equipment. However, industrial scenarios exhibit an inherent data scarcity problem, which imposes significant restrictions on the practical application of traditional deep learning-based intelligent fault diagnosis (IFD) methods. Typically, only a small volume of labeled data along with limited informative unlabeled data are available from industrial motors. Effectively utilizing informative unlabeled samples in the context of few-shot fault diagnosis poses a substantial challenge. In this article, a prototype refinement method for semi-supervised few-shot fault diagnosis based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is proposed. First, we propose to formalize a Markov decision process (MDP) of an iterative semi-supervised meta-learning strategy involving the selection of informative unlabeled samples and the refinement of category prototypes. Subsequently, we develop a mirror prototypical network (ProtoNet) structure for interaction with a DRL agent, which learns to adaptively select valuable samples to supervise the diagnosis process. Moreover, a state space involving feature embedding and category information is designed, and a comprehensive reward taking into account selection confidence, effectiveness, and representative is proposed. Extensive experiments on several motor experimental datasets verify the method’s effectiveness in few-shot diagnosis of unseen faults and new working conditions.