ACSE-RNformer: Amplitude-Calibrated Sequence Embedding and Response-Normalized Transformer for Vibration-Based Rotating Machinery Fault Diagnosis

To address the insufficient representation of fault characteristics in rotating machinery vibration signals, the sensitivity of conventional Transformers to variations in input response amplitudes, and the limited ability of fixed sequence embedding to preserve continuous temporal information, a rotating machinery fault diagnosis method based on Amplitude-Calibrated Sequence Embedding (ACSE) and a Response-Normalized Transformer (RNformer) is proposed. First, ACSE is designed to construct local temporal feature representations through continuous convolutional mapping, while an amplitude response estimation and adaptive amplitude calibration mechanism is employed to dynamically recalibrate the response intensity at different temporal positions. Rather than simply rescaling the signal amplitude range, amplitude calibration adaptively strengthens the feature contribution of regions associated with fault-induced impacts according to the vibration response intensity, thereby highlighting fault-sensitive information while suppressing the influence of noncritical amplitude fluctuations. In this way, continuous temporal characteristics are preserved while fault-relevant information is enhanced. Second, RNformer is constructed by incorporating a response normalization mechanism into the Transformer encoder to mitigate the interference of abnormal amplitude responses with global feature modeling, thereby improving the stability and robustness of feature representations under complex operating conditions. Finally, a lightweight channel attention mechanism is introduced to further enhance critical fault features and perform fault classification. Experiments were conducted on the Paderborn University bearing dataset and the University of Connecticut gear dataset. The proposed method achieved average diagnostic accuracies of 99.36% and 99.28%, respectively, outperforming the best-performing baseline methods by 1.82 and 1.56 percentage points. These results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method for fault diagnosis.