MTFSC: A Self-Supervised Transferable Representation Learning Algorithm for Diagnosing Cross-Machine Faults in Rotating Machinery

Rotating machinery is a key component in modern industry, and its operating condition directly affects equipment safety and production reliability. However, discrepancies among different machines cause source–target distribution shifts, while fault annotation for target machines is costly, limiting the performance of deep learning-based diagnosis under cross-machine scenarios with limited labels. To address these issues, this paper proposes a multi-scale time–frequency semantic consistency model based on self-supervised transferable representation learning, termed MTFSC. First, augmented waveform views and multi-scale frequency-domain views are constructed from unlabeled source-domain vibration signals for self-supervised pre-training without source labels. Then, a time-domain impulse-aware feature extractor and a time–frequency decoupled spectral feature extractor are designed to enhance local impulsive responses and emphasize fault-sensitive time–frequency patterns. Furthermore, a semantic-aware soft contrastive loss is developed to mine potential semantic neighbors from multi-scale frequency-domain structural similarity, reducing false-negative effects in conventional hard-label contrastive learning. Finally, the pre-trained time-domain extractor is transferred to the target machine and fine-tuned with limited labeled samples. Experimental results show that MTFSC outperforms comparison methods under different labeled sample ratios and achieves an average accuracy of 97.5% across four cross-machine diagnostic tasks.