In recent years, deep learning-based bearing fault diagnosis models have demonstrated excellent diagnostic performance under ideal experimental conditions. However, in practical industrial scenarios, the domain shift problem caused by data distribution differences severely undermines the generalization capability of such methods, which is particularly pronounced in cross-device bearing fault diagnosis tasks. Although existing transfer learning-based cross-device bearing fault diagnosis models have achieved encouraging progress, the following shortcomings persist. On the one hand, in cross-device scenarios, the sensitivity of time-domain impact features and frequency-domain resonance characteristics to differences in device structures is different, and the available samples from the target device are often limited. However, most models rely on a single feature domain for modeling, which makes it difficult for them to effectively capture the complete physical information that encompasses both fault‑impulse priors and device‑specific response characteristics, thereby limiting their stability and generalization capability. On the other hand, most models require substantial parameter adjustments during the transfer stage, making them highly prone to overfitting to the individual physical characteristics of the target device, thus undermining the effective knowledge already learned from the source domain. To alleviate the aforementioned issues, a time-frequency collaborative cross-device bearing fault diagnosis model based on supervised transfer learning with limited data is proposed. First, a time-frequency collaborative modeling paradigm is designed, which can extract multi-view complementary information from two physical dimensions: time-domain impact response and frequency-domain structural resonance. This information reflects both the essential attributes of fault patterns and the device‑specific response characteristics, thereby enhancing the robustness of the model to variations in device structures and operating conditions. Second, the low-rank adaptation mechanism is introduced to perform lightweight fine-tuning on key parameters of the pretrained model. This mechanism can constrain parameter updates within a low‑rank subspace, enabling the model to fit the device-specific physical responses of the target device while preserving the stability of the knowledge structure learned from the source domain, thus effectively reducing training complexity and the risk of overfitting. Finally, cross-device diagnosis scenarios are constructed through three real-world cases to comprehensively evaluate the performance of the proposed model. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model outperforms some current mainstream models in terms of both diagnostic accuracy and generalization performance, sufficiently demonstrating its effectiveness and practicality in cross-device scenarios.
Zhang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.