MDEA-Net: multisource disentangled expert adaptation network for cross-domain bearing fault diagnosis

Abstract

Accurate bearing fault diagnosis under varying operating conditions remains crucial for industrial reliability; however, the scarcity of labeled target data continues to significantly hinder the generalization of deep learning models. Existing unsupervised domain adaptation techniques often exhibit negative transfer by failing to distinguish between domain-invariant and domain-specific knowledge, leading to suboptimal adaptation. Therefore, this study proposes the Multisource Disentangled Expert Adaptation Network (MDEA-Net). MDEA-Net employs distinct shared expert networks to capture common fault characteristics across multiple source domains and private expert networks to model source-specific knowledge. Importantly, it explicitly disentangles these representations using an expert disentanglement loss, which raises both diversity and orthogonality. For efficient target adaptation, MDEA-Net utilizes frozen shared experts and introduces lightweight, target-specific private experts using low-rank adaptation. Domain alignment is accomplished by minimizing the maximum mean discrepancy specifically between shared feature spaces. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets (Case Western Reserve University, Jiangnan University, Xi’an Jiaotong University and Changxing Sumyoung Technology Co., Ltd) demonstrate that MDEA-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cross-domain bearing fault diagnosis.