To address the issues of low diagnostic accuracy in traditional rolling bearing fault diagnosis models and the ineffective extraction of spatial and temporal features from vibration signals, this paper proposes a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on the improved sparrow search algorithm optimized VMD and multi-scale convolutional neural networks. First, the improved sparrow search algorithm is employed to adaptively optimize the penalty parameter and mode count in variational modal decomposition (VMD). This achieves finer frequency band segmentation and effectively suppresses energy leakage, thereby yielding high quality frequency domain representations. Second, a multi-scale convolutional neural networks (MSCNN) is constructed, with feature level fusion implemented. Subsequently, a bidirectional long short-term memory networks (BiLSTM) is introduced to model the temporal dependencies of the fused features, enabling fault mode learning. A softmax layer is employed to achieve multi-class classification. Finally experimental results and comparisons based on the CWRU bearing dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the rolling bearing fault classification task, providing significant application value for achieving efficient and reliable bearing fault detection.