A Time-Frequency-Condition Multimodal Fusion Foundation Model for Universal Rotating-Machinery Fault Diagnosis under Multi-Element Heterogeneous Scenarios

arXiv:2611.15051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intelligent fault diagnosis models are typically developed for a single machine under a specific set of operating conditions, such that each new machine or condition requires retraining from scratch. This one-machine-one-model paradigm scales poorly. Although transfer learning and domain generalization can reduce the labeling burden, they primarily seek domain-invariant commonality, potentially discarding machine-specific characteristics that are critical for diagnosis. This paper proposes TFC-MMFD, a time-frequency-condition multimodal fusion foundation model for rotating-machinery fault diagnosis under multi-element heterogeneous scenarios. Statistical indicators, time-frequency images, vibration sequences, and textual machine and condition descriptions are tokenized into a unified language-like space, allowing inputs of different physical origin to be represented as a single sequence. A LLaMA backbone, together with cross-modal bidirectional attention and a Q-Former, then distills this sequence into fault-mode queries. Diagnosis is performed by matching these queries against natural-language fault-mode anchors rather than fixed class indices, while regression-adversarial condition disentanglement and condition-conditioned masked pre-training improve robustness to changing conditions. Across four progressive tasks on ten public bearing datasets spanning diverse bearing types, speeds, and loads, TFC-MMFD attains 99.40% accuracy and 99.16% macro-F1, maintains over 80% accuracy on most interpolated unseen conditions without adaptation, and improves from 20.26% to 95.63% accuracy on an unseen machine with only five labeled samples per class. It outperforms the strongest of eight domain-generalization baselines by 10.57 percentage points and compares favorably with a recent bearing foundation model while using less than half of its fine-tuning data.