Siamese networks are a type of neural network architecture that contains two or more identical subnetworks. They are used to find the similarity of inputs by comparing their feature vectors. This allows Siamese networks to learn a similarity function and classify new classes of data without retraining, which is useful for problems like face recognition that require learning from limited data. The main advantages are that they are more robust to class imbalance and can learn from semantic similarity with only a few images per class. However, their drawbacks include needing more training time than normal networks and being slower than normal classification learning.