Publications

A key energy consumption in steel metallurgy comes from an iron ore sintering process. Enhancing carbon utilization in this process is important for green manufacturing and energy saving and its prerequisite is a time-series prediction of carbon efficiency. The existing carbon efficiency models usually have a complex structure, leading to a time-consuming training process. In addition, a complete retraining process will be encountered if the models are inaccurate or data change. Analyzing the complex characteristics of the sintering process, we develop an original prediction framework, that is, a weighted kernel-based fuzzy C-means (WKFCM)-based broad learning model (BLM), to achieve fast and effective carbon efficiency modeling. First, sintering parameters affecting carbon efficiency are determined, following the sintering process mechanism. Next, WKFCM clustering is first presented for the identification of multiple operating conditions to better reflect the system dynamics of this process. Then, the BLM is built under each operating condition. Finally, a nearest neighbor criterion is used to determine which BLM is invoked for the time-series prediction of carbon efficiency. Experimental results using actual run data exhibit that, compared with other prediction models, the developed model can more accurately and efficiently achieve the time-series prediction of carbon efficiency. Furthermore, the developed model can also be used for the efficient and effective modeling of other industrial processes due to its flexible structure.

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Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) presents challenges due to texture information loss and uneven illumination, which can distort feature distribution and reduce the quality of the enhanced images. However, current deep learning methods for LLIE only use supervised information from clear images to extract low-light image features, while disregarding the negative information in low-light images (i.e., low illumination and noise). To address these challenges, we propose a novel LLIE method, LACR-VAE, by leveraging the negative information and considering the uneven illumination. In particular, a Light-Aware Contrastive Regularization (LACR) based on contrastive learning is designed to exploit information from both clear and low-light images. The LACR aims to align latent variables of enhanced images with clear images, away from those of low-light images. This allows the method to prioritize essential elements for LLIE and minimize noise and lighting variations. Furthermore, considering the uneven illumination with diverse region sizes and shapes, a Region-CAlibrated Module (RCAM) is present to learn local and global illumination relations among image regions, and an Attention-guided Multi-Scale Module (AMSM) is designed to extract multi-scale features that improve the model’s representation capability. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves superior performance than previous works. Specifically, our method yields a significant enhancement in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) testset, achieving an improvement of at least 0.99 in PSNR and 0.0409 in SSIM. Codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/csxuwu/LACR-VAE .

A novel score function based on the Poincaré metric is proposed and applied to a decision-making problem. Decision-making on Fuzzy Sets (FSs) has been considered due to the flexibility of the data, and it is applied to the decision-making. However, decisions with FSs are sometimes nondecisive even for different membership degrees. Hence, Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets (IFSs) data is applied to design a score function for the decision-making with the Poincaré metric. This function is supported by the profound information of IFSs; IFSs include hesitation degree together with membership and non-membership degree. Hence, IFS membership and non-membership degree are expressed as two-dimensional vectors satisfying the Poincaré metric for simplification. At the same time, the proposed approach addresses the hesitation information in the IFS data. Next, a score function is proposed, constructed and provided. The proposed score function has a strict monotonic property and addresses the preference without resorting to the accuracy function. The strict monotonic property guarantees the preference of all attributes. Additionally, the existing problem of score function design in IFSs is addressed: they return zero scores even with different meanings for the same membership and non-membership degree. The advantages of the proposed score function over existing ones are demonstrated through illustrative examples. From the calculation results, the proposed decision score function discriminates between all candidates. Hence, the proposed research provides a solid foundation for the hesitation analysis on the decision-making problem.

The learning of fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) is a timely issue pursued by numerous researchers. Many learning methods, such as population-based algorithms and some hybrid algorithms, have been developed and applied to many fields resulting in better performance. However, those learning algorithms also exhibit obvious limitations: some of them either are difficult to handle the learning problem of large-scale FCM or extremely time-consuming with high computational overload. Furthermore, the learning problem of FCM with noisy data is rarely considered in existing algorithms. In this article, a fast and efficient method for learning FCM is proposed. It first transforms the learning problem of the FCM into a convex optimization problem with constraints, and then, the classic interior-point methods are invoked to solve the optimization problem to obtain the optimized weight matrix of the FCM. A series of experiments involving synthetic data, noisy synthetic data, real data, and publicly available data with noise are considered to demonstrate that the proposed method can rapidly and efficiently learn small-scale and large-scale FCMs and deal with the problem of learning FCM from noisy historical data.