EAAI Journal 2026 Journal Article
A novel incremental method with dynamic learnable pruning mechanism for low-speed machinery fault diagnosis
- Haihong Tang
- Xiaojia Zu
- Yuncheng Guoa
- Xue Jiang
- Jinbao Wang
- Rongsheng Lin
- Hongtao Xue
- Huaqing Wang
—it is a non-negligible issue for catastrophic forgetting to perform low-speed bearing fault diagnosis, whereas previously learned features significantly affect the model's performance facing challenges related to the fault information increments. In terms of issues, a new lifelong learning based on inverted transformers with learnable pruning mechanism is proposed to enhance adaptability facing multiple fault information increments. The backbone of diagnosis model effectively learned global information perception and local information refinement in signals of multiple sensors through the multi-head inverted attention in the inverted transformer. One new contribution (the dynamic learnable pruning mechanism), consisting of dynamic exemplar selection and pruning mechanism, effectively assists in balancing the memory and learning capabilities, that is, consolidating the stability-plasticity of the model. The former is performed to adjust the retention and utilization of exemplars in the memory bank, thereby keeping memory through the exemplars' diversity, mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, the latter is applied to address the dilemma caused by predefined and fixed structures in the previous stage throughout the entire training process of the model. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method is validated on low-speed machinery (two cases).