To enhance diagnosis accuracy of vibration faults for steam turbinegenerator sets (STGS), this paper presents evolutionary programming-based radial basis function (EP-RBF) networks. The proposed EP automatically determine the optimal parameters for the RBF network, which includes the number of neurons in the hidden layer, the centers of hidden neurons, the spread parameters, and the weights in the output layer of the RBF network. The test results demonstrate that the proposed EP-RBF network has a higher diagnostic accuracy than the RBF network and multilayer perceptron (MLP) network trained by error back-propagation algorithm. Moreover, this paper reveals that the proposed EP-RBF network can apply to effectively diagnose vibration fault of STGS.