Deep Generative Models in Condition and Structural Health Monitoring: Opportunities, Limitations and Future Outlook

Abstract: Condition and structural health monitoring (CM/SHM) is a pivotal component of predictive maintenance (PdM) strategies across diverse industrial sectors, including mechanical rotating machinery, airplane composite wings, offshore wind turbines, and civil engineering structures. Conventional deep learning models, while effective in fault diagnosis and anomaly detection through supervised feature extraction and rule-based data augmentation, often struggle with operational variability, imbalanced or scarce fault datasets, and multimodal sensory data from complex systems. Deep generative models (DGMs) in this regard, including autoregressive models, variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, diffusion-based models, and emerging LLMs, offer transformative capabilities by synthesizing high-fidelity data samples, reconstructing latent system states, and modeling complex multimodal data streams. This review systematically examines state-of-the-art DGM applications in CM/SHM systems, emphasizing their role in addressing key challenges: data imbalance and imputation, domain adaptation and generalization, multimodal data fusion, and downstream fault diagnosis and anomaly detection tasks, with rigorous comparison among signal processing, conventional machine learning or deep learning models, and DGMs. We also analyze current limitations of DGMs, including challenges of explainable and trustworthy models, computational inefficiencies for edge deployment, and the need for parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies. Future research directions can focus on zero-shot and few-shot learning, robust multimodal generalization, hybrid architectures integrating DGMs with physics knowledge, and reinforcement learning with DGMs to enhance robustness and accuracy in industrial scenarios.