An End-to-End Fault Diagnosis Model for Rolling Bearings Based on Multi-Scale Convolution and the Kolmogorov–Arnold Network

Rolling bearings, as core components of rotating machinery, are prone to failure under harsh working conditions, and their fault diagnosis is crucial for the safe operation of industrial systems. Aiming at resolving the problems of weak fault feature representation, poor model generalization ability and high dependence on manual preprocessing in traditional bearing fault diagnosis methods, an end-to-end fault diagnosis model named KanMSConv is proposed for one-dimensional raw vibration signals. The model abandons complex time–frequency transformation and manual feature engineering, and constructs a multi-scale feature extraction module based on depthwise separable convolution to capture local impulsive components and global modulation characteristics of fault signals simultaneously. The SE channel attention mechanism is integrated to adaptively enhance fault-related critical features and reduce redundant channel responses. Residual connection is introduced to alleviate the gradient degradation problem of deep networks and improve feature reuse capability. On this basis, the Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) is used to replace the traditional fully connected layer, which enhances the model’s ability to fit complex nonlinear mapping relationships and distinguish fault classification boundaries. Experimental verification is carried out on three representative rolling bearing datasets (CWRU, PU, SDUST) under multi-load, multi-class and cross-platform conditions. The results show that the KanMSConv model achieves 100% accuracy on the CWRU dataset, 99.93% on the PU dataset and 99.80% on the SDUST dataset, which is significantly superior to the existing mainstream fault diagnosis models in terms of Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F1-Score. And the ablation and computational cost analyses further support this conclusion.