---
title: "Few-shot learning research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “few-shot learning” appeared in 832 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (812), operations research (9) and information systems (4)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/few-shot-learning
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/few-shot-learning.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “few-shot learning” appeared in 832 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (812), operations research (9) and information systems (4). (as of 2026-11-03)"
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-11-03T18:03:37+09:00
window: 2026-10-05 to 2026-11-03
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# Papers on “few-shot learning”

Research on “few-shot learning” in the 480 tracked journals: papers per year and category, the journals, institutions and countries publishing it, the keywords studied with it and its most-cited papers. It is not among the most frequent keywords of the last 30 days, so this page has no list of its latest papers.

Back to the ranking: https://scholar4ai.com/rankings/keywords.md

## Key findings

- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “few-shot learning” appeared in 832 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (812), operations research (9) and information systems (4).
- 196 of them were published in 2025, against 5 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Xidian University (27), Chinese Academy of Sciences (24) and Nanyang Technological University (22).
- The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (102), Knowledge-Based Systems (96) and Pattern Recognition (72).
- The most-cited of them is “Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models” (International Journal of Computer Vision, 2022), with 3,314 citations.

## Papers per year

*Papers per publication year and category*

| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 5 | 2 | 12 | 25 | 42 | 86 | 136 | 160 | 191 | 153 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 8 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| [Higher Education and Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/higher-education-and-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| [Finance](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/finance.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| All categories | 5 | 2 | 12 | 26 | 43 | 86 | 136 | 163 | 196 | 163 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 102 |
| 2 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 96 |
| 3 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 72 |
| 4 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 48 |
| 5 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 42 |
| 6 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 40 |
| 7 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 37 |
| 8 | [Information Processing & Management](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-processing-management.md) | 27 |
| 9 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 27 |
| 10 | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 24 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Xidian University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xidian-university.md) | 27 |
| 2 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 24 |
| 3 | [Nanyang Technological University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/nanyang-technological-university.md) | 22 |
| 4 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 20 |
| 5 | [Xi'an Jiaotong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xi-an-jiaotong-university.md) | 18 |
| 6 | [Beijing Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/beijing-institute-of-technology.md) | 15 |
| 7 | [Harbin Institute of Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/harbin-institute-of-technology.md) | 14 |
| 8 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 14 |
| 9 | [Hong Kong Polytechnic University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/hong-kong-polytechnic-university.md) | 13 |
| 10 | [Huazhong University of Science and Technology](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/huazhong-university-of-science-and-technology.md) | 13 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 496 |
| 2 | United States | 57 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 39 |
| 4 | Singapore | 38 |
| 5 | Hong Kong | 37 |
| 6 | Australia | 30 |
| 7 | Canada | 20 |
| 8 | Italy | 17 |
| 9 | South Korea | 16 |
| 10 | India | 13 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [meta-learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/meta-learning.md) | 81 |
| 2 | zero-shot learning | 59 |
| 3 | [large language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/large-language-models.md) | 55 |
| 4 | [domain adaptation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/domain-adaptation.md) | 35 |
| 5 | [vision-language models](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/vision-language-models.md) | 34 |
| 6 | CLIP | 29 |
| 7 | [contrastive learning](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/contrastive-learning.md) | 29 |
| 8 | [data augmentation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/data-augmentation.md) | 29 |
| 9 | data scarcity | 28 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3,314 | 64.8 | [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-022-01653-1) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 2022-07-31 | Kaiyang Zhou, Jingkang Yang, Chen Change Loy et al. |
| 2 | 1,033 | 13.0 | [Recent Advances in Open Set Recognition: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2020.2981604) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2020-03-18 | Chuanxing Geng, Sheng-Jun Huang, Songcan Chen |
| 3 | 888 | 12.7 | [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2021.3079209) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2021-01-01 | Timothy M. Hospedales, Antreas Antoniou, Paul Micaelli et al. |
| 4 | 266 | 4.4 | [Meta-learning as a promising approach for few-shot cross-domain fault diagnosis: Algorithms, applications, and prospects](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2021.107646) | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 2021-10-27 | Yong Feng, Jinglong Chen, Jingsong Xie et al. |
| 5 | 240 | 5.9 | [Generalized MAML for few-shot cross-domain fault diagnosis of bearing driven by heterogeneous signals](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120696) | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 2023-06-08 | Jian Lin, Haidong Shao, Xiangdong Zhou et al. |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “few-shot learning”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/few-shot-learning

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-few-shot-learning,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Papers on “few-shot learning”},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/few-shot-learning}},
  urldate = {2026-11-03},
  note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).