YangQuan Chen

Zhuo Li, Lu Liu, Sina Dehghan et al.

In recent years, as fractional calculus becomes more and more broadly used in research across different academic disciplines, there are increasing demands for the numerical tools for the computation of fractional integration/differentiation, and the simulation of fractional order systems. Time to time, being asked about which tool is suitable for a specific application, the authors decide to carry out this survey to present recapitulative information of the available tools in the literature, in hope of benefiting researchers with different academic backgrounds. With this motivation, the present article collects the scattered tools into a dashboard view, briefly introduces their usage and algorithms, evaluates the accuracy, compares the performance, and provides informative comments for selection.

Jiacai Huang, Yangquan Chen, Haibin Li et al.

Modeling human operator's dynamic plays a very important role in the manual closed-loop control system, and it is an active research area for several decades. Based on the characteristics of human brain and behaviour, a new kind of fractional order mathematical model for human operator in SISO systems is proposed. Compared with the traditional models based on the commonly used quasi-linear transfer function method or the optimal control theory method, the proposed fractional order model has simple structure with only few parameters, and each parameter has explicit physical meanings. The actual data and experiment results with the second-order controlled element illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Zhuang Jiao, YangQuan Chen, Yi-Sheng Zhong

Bounded-input bounded-output stability condition of linear time invariant (LTI) distributed-order system over integral interval $(0,1)$ has been established for the first time. Two cases about weighting function of the distributed order are investigated, and sufficient and necessary conditions of stability for these two types of distributed-order systems are derived. Based on the complex integration analysis, time-domain responses of distributed-order systems are also given by analytical method, and numerical examples are presented to illustrate the proposed conditions.

Zhuang Jiao, YangQuan Chen

The impulse response of a generalized fractional second order filter of the form ${{({{s}^{2α}}+a{{s}^α}+b)}^{-γ}}$ is derived, where $0<α\le 1$, $0<γ<2$. The asymptotic properties of the impulse responses are obtained for two cases, and the two cases show the similar properties for the changing of $γ$ values. It is shown that only when ${{({{s}^{2α}}+a{{s}^α}+b)}^{-1}}$ has the critical stability, the generalized fractional second order filter ${{({{s}^{2α}}+a{{s}^α}+b)}^{-γ}}$ has different properties as we change the value of $γ$. Finally, numerical examples to illustrate the impulse response are provided to verify the proposed concepts.

Sina Dehghan, Tiebiao Zhao, Yang Zhao et al.

This paper presents a multi-variable Model Predictive Control (MPC) based controller for the one-staged refrigeration cycle model described in the PID2018 Benchmark Challenge. This model represents a two-input, two-output system with strong nonlinearities and high coupling between its variables. A general purpose optimal control problem (OCP) solver Matlab toolbox called RIOTS is used as the OCP solver for the proposed MPC scheme which allows for straightforward implementation of the method and for solving a wide range of constrained linear and nonlinear optimal control problems. A conditional integral (CI) compensator is embedded in the controller to compensate for the small steady state errors. This method shows significant improvements in performance compared to both discrete decentralized control (C1) and multi-variable PID controller (C2) originally given in PID2018 Benchmark Challenge as a baseline. Our solution is introduced in detail in this paper and our final results using the overall relative index, $J$, are 0.2 over C1 and 0.3 over C2, respectively. In other words, we achieved 80% improvement over C1 and 70% improvement over C2. We expect to achieve further improvements when some optimized searching efforts are used for MPC and CI parameter tuning.

Jie Yuan, Abdullah Ates, Sina Dehghan et al.

Since proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers absolutely dominate the control engineering, numbers of different control structures and theories have been developed to enhance the efficiency of PID controllers. Thus, it is essential and inspiring to operate different PID control strategies to the PID2018 Benchmark Challenge. In this paper, a novel control strategy is designed for this refrigeration system, where a feedforward compensator and a conditional integrator are utilized to compensate the disturbances and remove the steady-state error in the benchmark problem, respectively. The simulation results given in the benchmark problem show the straightforward effectiveness of the proposed control structure compared with the existing control methods.

Abdullah Ates, Jie Yuan, Sina Dehghan et al.

This paper presents a multi-objective stochastic optimization method for tuning of the controller parameters of Refrigeration Systems based on Vapour Compression. Stochastic Multi Parameter Divergence Optimization (SMDO) algorithm is modified for minimization of the Multi Objective function for optimization process. System control performance is improved by tuning of the PI controller parameters according to discrete time model of the refrigeration system with multi objective function by adding conditional integral structure that is preferred to reduce the steady state error of the system. Simulations are compared with existing results via many graphical and numerical solutions.

Yang Zhao, Sina Dehghan, Abdullah Ates et al.

The design and application of learning feedforward controllers (LFFC) for the one-staged refrigeration cycle model described in the PID2018 Benchmark Challenge is presented, and its effectiveness is evaluated. The control system consists of two components: 1) a preset PID component and 2) a learning feedforward component which is a function approximator that is adapted on the basis of the feedback signal. A B-spline network based LFFC and a low-pass filter based LFFC are designed to track the desired outlet temperature of evaporator secondary flux and the superheating degree of refrigerant at evaporator outlet. Encouraging simulation results are included. Qualitative and quantitative comparison results evaluations show that, with little effort, a high-performance control system can be obtained with this approach. Our initial simple attempt of low-pass filter based LFFC and B-spline network based LFFC give J=0.4902 and J=0.6536 relative to the decentralized PID controller, respectively. Besides, the initial attempt of a combination controller of our optimized PI controller and low-pass filter LFFC gives J=0.6947 relative to the multi-variable PID controller.

Zhuang Jiao, YangQuan Chen, Yi-Sheng Zhong

Bounded-input bounded-output stability conditions for fractional-order linear time-invariant (LTI) system with multiple noncommensurate orders have been established in this paper. The orders become noncommensurate orders when they do not have a common divisor. Sufficient and necessary conditions of stability for this kind of fractional-order LTI system with multiple noncommensurate orders. Based on the numerical inverse Laplace transform technique, time-domain responses for a fractional-order system with double noncommensurate orders are presented to illustrate the obtained stability results.

Mohammad Partohaghighi, Roummel Marcia, Bruce J. West et al.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients while preserving data privacy, yet faces challenges in non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) settings due to client drift, which impairs convergence. We propose RI-FedAvg, a novel FL algorithm that mitigates client drift by incorporating a Roughness Index (RI)-based regularization term into the local objective, adaptively penalizing updates based on the fluctuations of local loss landscapes. This paper introduces RI-FedAvg, leveraging the RI to quantify the roughness of high-dimensional loss functions, ensuring robust optimization in heterogeneous settings. We provide a rigorous convergence analysis for non-convex objectives, establishing that RI-FedAvg converges to a stationary point under standard assumptions. Extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 demonstrate that RI-FedAvg outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including FedAvg, FedProx, FedDyn, SCAFFOLD, and DP-FedAvg, achieving higher accuracy and faster convergence in non-IID scenarios. Our results highlight RI-FedAvg's potential to enhance the robustness and efficiency of federated learning in practical, heterogeneous environments.

Mohammad Partohaghighi, Roummel Marcia, Bruce J. West et al.

Privacy-preserving training on sensitive data commonly relies on differentially private stochastic optimization with gradient clipping and Gaussian noise. The clipping threshold is a critical control knob: if set too small, systematic over-clipping induces optimization bias; if too large, injected noise dominates updates and degrades accuracy. Existing adaptive clipping methods often depend on per-example gradient norm statistics, adding computational overhead and introducing sensitivity to datasets and architectures. We propose a control-driven clipping strategy that adapts the threshold using a lightweight, weight-only spectral diagnostic computed from model parameters. At periodic probe steps, the method analyzes a designated weight matrix via spectral decomposition and estimates a heavy-tailed spectral indicator associated with training stability. This indicator is smoothed over time and fed into a bounded feedback controller that updates the clipping threshold multiplicatively in the log domain. Because the controller uses only parameters produced during privacy-preserving training, the resulting threshold updates are post-processing and do not increase privacy loss beyond that of the underlying DP optimizer under standard composition accounting.

Mohammad Partohaghighi, Roummel Marcia, YangQuan Chen

Federated learning (FL) allows remote clients to train a global model collaboratively while protecting client privacy. Despite its privacy-preserving benefits, FL has significant drawbacks, including slow convergence, high communication cost, and non-independent-and-identically-distributed (non-IID) data. In this work, we present a novel FedAvg variation called Fractional-Order Federated Averaging (FOFedAvg), which incorporates Fractional-Order Stochastic Gradient Descent (FOSGD) to capture long-range relationships and deeper historical information. By introducing memory-aware fractional-order updates, FOFedAvg improves communication efficiency and accelerates convergence while mitigating instability caused by heterogeneous, non-IID client data. We compare FOFedAvg against a broad set of established federated optimization algorithms on benchmark datasets including MNIST, FEMNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, EMNIST, the Cleveland heart disease dataset, Sent140, PneumoniaMNIST, and Edge-IIoTset. Across a range of non-IID partitioning schemes, FOFedAvg is competitive with, and often outperforms, these baselines in terms of test performance and convergence speed. On the theoretical side, we prove that FOFedAvg converges to a stationary point under standard smoothness and bounded-variance assumptions for fractional order $0<α\le 1$. Together, these results show that fractional-order, memory-aware updates can substantially improve the robustness and effectiveness of federated learning, offering a practical path toward distributed training on heterogeneous data.

Mohammad Partohaghighi, Roummel Marcia, Bruce J. West et al.

Federated learning on connected electric vehicles (BEVs) faces severe instability due to intermittent connectivity, time-varying client participation, and pronounced client-to-client variation induced by diverse operating conditions. Conventional FedAvg and many advanced methods can suffer from excessive drift and degraded convergence under these realistic constraints. This work introduces Fractional-Order Roughness-Informed Federated Averaging (FO-RI-FedAvg), a lightweight and modular extension of FedAvg that improves stability through two complementary client-side mechanisms: (i) adaptive roughness-informed proximal regularization, which dynamically tunes the pull toward the global model based on local loss-landscape roughness, and (ii) non-integer-order local optimization, which incorporates short-term memory to smooth conflicting update directions. The approach preserves standard FedAvg server aggregation, adds only element-wise operations with amortizable overhead, and allows independent toggling of each component. Experiments on two real-world BEV energy prediction datasets, VED and its extended version eVED, show that FO-RI-FedAvg achieves improved accuracy and more stable convergence compared to strong federated baselines, particularly under reduced client participation.

Mohammad Partohaghighi, Roummel Marcia, Bruce J. West et al.

Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of a designated forget set from a trained model while preserving utility on the retained data. In modern deep networks, approximate unlearning frequently fails under large or adversarial deletions due to pronounced layer-wise heterogeneity: some layers exhibit stable, well-regularized representations while others are brittle, undertrained, or overfit, so naive update allocation can trigger catastrophic forgetting or unstable dynamics. We propose Statistical-Roughness Adaptive Gradient Unlearning (SRAGU), a mechanism-first unlearning algorithm that reallocates unlearning updates using layer-wise statistical roughness operationalized via heavy-tailed spectral diagnostics of layer weight matrices. Starting from an Adaptive Gradient Unlearning (AGU) sensitivity signal computed on the forget set, SRAGU estimates a WeightWatcher-style heavy-tailed exponent for each layer, maps it to a bounded spectral stability weight, and uses this stability signal to spectrally reweight the AGU sensitivities before applying the same minibatch update form. This concentrates unlearning motion in spectrally stable layers while damping updates in unstable or overfit layers, improving stability under hard deletions. We evaluate unlearning via behavioral alignment to a gold retrained reference model trained from scratch on the retained data, using empirical prediction-divergence and KL-to-gold proxies on a forget-focused query set; we additionally report membership inference auditing as a complementary leakage signal, treating forget-set points as should-be-forgotten members during evaluation.

Mohammad Partohaghighi, Roummel Marcia, YangQuan Chen

Fractional-order stochastic gradient descent (FOSGD) leverages fractional exponents to capture long-memory effects in optimization. However, its utility is often limited by the difficulty of tuning and stabilizing these exponents. We propose 2SED Fractional-Order Stochastic Gradient Descent (2SEDFOSGD), which integrates the Two-Scale Effective Dimension (2SED) algorithm with FOSGD to adapt the fractional exponent in a data-driven manner. By tracking model sensitivity and effective dimensionality, 2SEDFOSGD dynamically modulates the exponent to mitigate oscillations and hasten convergence. Theoretically, this approach preserves the advantages of fractional memory without the sluggish or unstable behavior observed in naïve fractional SGD. Empirical evaluations in Gaussian and $α$-stable noise scenarios using an autoregressive (AR) model\textcolor{red}{, as well as on the MNIST and CIFAR-100 datasets for image classification,} highlight faster convergence and more robust parameter estimates compared to baseline methods, underscoring the potential of dimension-aware fractional techniques for advanced modeling and estimation tasks.

Mohammad Partohaghighi, Roummel Marcia, YangQuan Chen

Fractional-order stochastic gradient descent (FOSGD) leverages fractional exponents to capture long-memory effects in optimization. However, its utility is often limited by the difficulty of tuning and stabilizing these exponents. We propose 2SED Fractional-Order Stochastic Gradient Descent (2SEDFOSGD), which integrates the Two-Scale Effective Dimension (2SED) algorithm with FOSGD to adapt the fractional exponent in a data-driven manner. By tracking model sensitivity and effective dimensionality, 2SEDFOSGD dynamically modulates the exponent to mitigate oscillations and hasten convergence. Theoretically, for onoconvex optimization problems, this approach preserves the advantages of fractional memory without the sluggish or unstable behavior observed in naïve fractional SGD. Empirical evaluations in Gaussian and $α$-stable noise scenarios using an autoregressive (AR) model highlight faster convergence and more robust parameter estimates compared to baseline methods, underscoring the potential of dimension-aware fractional techniques for advanced modeling and estimation tasks.

Guoxiang Zhang, YangQuan Chen

Visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) and 3D reconstruction methods have gone through impressive progress. These methods are very promising for autonomous vehicle and consumer robot applications because they can map large-scale environments such as cities and indoor environments without the need for much human effort. However, when it comes to loop detection and optimization, there is still room for improvement. vSLAM systems tend to add the loops very conservatively to reduce the severe influence of the false loops. These conservative checks usually lead to correct loops rejected, thus decrease performance. In this paper, an algorithm that can sift and majorize loop detections is proposed. Our proposed algorithm can compare the usefulness and effectiveness of different loops with the dense map posterior (DMP) metric. The algorithm tests and decides the acceptance of each loop without a single user-defined threshold. Thus it is adaptive to different data conditions. The proposed method is general and agnostic to sensor type (as long as depth or LiDAR reading presents), loop detection, and optimization methods. Neither does it require a specific type of SLAM system. Thus it has great potential to be applied to various application scenarios. Experiments are conducted on public datasets. Results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Guoxiang Zhang, YangQuan Chen

It is not easy when evaluating 3D mapping performance because existing metrics require ground truth data that can only be collected with special instruments. In this paper, we propose a metric, dense map posterior (DMP), for this evaluation. It can work without any ground truth data. Instead, it calculates a comparable value, reflecting a map posterior probability, from dense point cloud observations. In our experiments, the proposed DMP is benchmarked against ground truth-based metrics. Results show that DMP can provide a similar evaluation capability. The proposed metric makes evaluating different methods more flexible and opens many new possibilities, such as self-supervised methods and more available datasets.

Guoxiang Zhang, YangQuan Chen

Random sample consensus (RANSAC) is a robust model-fitting algorithm. It is widely used in many fields including image-stitching and point cloud registration. In RANSAC, data is uniformly sampled for hypothesis generation. However, this uniform sampling strategy does not fully utilize all the information on many problems. In this paper, we propose a method that samples data with a Lévy distribution together with a data sorting algorithm. In the hypothesis sampling step of the proposed method, data is sorted with a sorting algorithm we proposed, which sorts data based on the likelihood of a data point being in the inlier set. Then, hypotheses are sampled from the sorted data with Lévy distribution. The proposed method is evaluated on both simulation and real-world public datasets. Our method shows better results compared with the uniform baseline method.

Jairo Viola, YangQuan Chen, Jing Wang

Failure detection is employed in the industry to improve system performance and reduce costs due to unexpected malfunction events. So, a good dataset of the system is desirable for designing an automated failure detection system. However, industrial process datasets are unbalanced and contain little information about failure behavior due to the uniqueness of these events and the high cost for running the system just to get information about the undesired behaviors. For this reason, performing correct training and validation of automated failure detection methods is challenging. This paper proposes a methodology called FaultFace for failure detection on Ball-Bearing joints for rotational shafts using deep learning techniques to create balanced datasets. The FaultFace methodology uses 2D representations of vibration signals denominated faceportraits obtained by time-frequency transformation techniques. From the obtained faceportraits, a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network is employed to produce new faceportraits of the nominal and failure behaviors to get a balanced dataset. A Convolutional Neural Network is trained for fault detection employing the balanced dataset. The FaultFace methodology is compared with other deep learning techniques to evaluate its performance in for fault detection with unbalanced datasets. Obtained results show that FaultFace methodology has a good performance for failure detection for unbalanced datasets.

Jiamin Wei, YangQuan Chen, Yongguang Yu et al.

Lévy flights is a random walk where the step-lengths have a probability distribution that is heavy-tailed. It has been shown that Lévy flights can maximize the efficiency of resource searching in uncertain environments, and also movements of many foragers and wandering animals have been shown to follow a Lévy distribution. The reason mainly comes from that the Lévy distribution, has an infinite second moment, and hence is more likely to generate an offspring that is farther away from its parent. However, the investigation into the efficiency of other different heavy-tailed probability distributions in swarm-based searches is still insufficient up to now. For swarm-based search algorithms, randomness plays a significant role in both exploration and exploitation, or diversification and intensification. Therefore, it's necessary to discuss the optimal randomness in swarm-based search algorithms. In this study, CS is taken as a representative method of swarm-based optimization algorithms, and the results can be generalized to other swarm-based search algorithms. In this paper, four different types of commonly used heavy-tailed distributions, including Mittag-Leffler distribution, Pareto distribution, Cauchy distribution, and Weibull distribution, are considered to enhance the searching ability of CS. Then four novel CS algorithms are proposed and experiments are carried out on 20 benchmark functions to compare their searching performances. Finally, the proposed methods are used to system identification to demonstrate the effectiveness.

Zhenlong Wu, Jie Yuan, Yuquan Chen et al.

To handle the control difficulties caused by high-order dynamics, a control structure based on fractional order [proportional integral] (PI) controller and fractional order Smith-like predictor for a class of high order systems in the type of K/(Ts+1)n is proposed in this paper. The analysis of the tracking and disturbance rejection is illustrated based on the terminal value theorem and shows that the proposed control structure can ensure that the closed-loop system converges to the set point without static error and the closed-loop system recovers to its original state when the input disturbance occurs. Then, simulations about the influence on the control performance and control signal with different are carried out based on multi-objective genetic algorithm (MO-GA). The results show that the control performance can be improved and the energy of the control signal can be reduced simultaneously when the order is chosen no more than one. This can verify that the fractional order Smith-like predictor with has an advantage over that of the integral order Smith-like predictor.

Jairo Viola, Alberto Radici, YangQuan Chen

This paper presents the design of multivariable temperature control for a refrigeration system based on vapor compression employing the internal model control technique. The refrigeration system is based on the PID18 benchmark, which is a $2\times 2$ MIMO system. The controlled output variables of the refrigeration system are the cooling power managed through the outlet temperature of the evaporator and the superheating degree at the condenser. The input variables of the system are the valve opening and the compressor speed. System identification is performed by applying stepped signals to the input variables, resulting in four transfer functions estimated with a Box-Jenkins model. From the MIMO system transfer functions, the relative gain array is calculated to determinate the best variables to be paired. After that, according to the variables to be paired, the corresponding transfer functions are reduced to order two to design a PID controller for each output variable employing the internal model control technique. Then, the controllers are contrasted employing a set of quantitative performance indexes with the control results achieved in the PID18 workshop. Obtained results show that the proposed Internal Model controllers have better performance than most of the proposed controllers at the PID18.

Guoxiang Zhang, YangQuan Chen

We present a visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework of closing surface loops. It combines both sparse feature matching and dense surface alignment. Sparse feature matching is used for visual odometry and globally camera pose fine-tuning when dense loops are detected, while dense surface alignment is the way of closing large loops and solving surface mismatching problem. To achieve smart dense surface loop closure, a highly efficient CUDA-based global point cloud registration method and a map content dependent loop verification method are proposed. We run extensive experiments on different datasets, our method outperforms state-of-the-art ones in terms of both camera trajectory and surface reconstruction accuracy.

Qi Yang, Yanzhu Zhang, Tiebiao Zhao et al.

Image super-resolution using self-optimizing mask via fractional-order gradient interpolation and reconstruction aims to recover detailed information from low-resolution images and reconstruct them into high-resolution images. Due to the limited amount of data and information retrieved from low-resolution images, it is difficult to restore clear, artifact-free images, while still preserving enough structure of the image such as the texture. This paper presents a new single image super-resolution method which is based on adaptive fractional-order gradient interpolation and reconstruction. The interpolated image gradient via optimal fractional-order gradient is first constructed according to the image similarity and afterwards the minimum energy function is employed to reconstruct the final high-resolution image. Fractional-order gradient based interpolation methods provide an additional degree of freedom which helps optimize the implementation quality due to the fact that an extra free parameter $α$-order is being used. The proposed method is able to produce a rich texture detail while still being able to maintain structural similarity even under large zoom conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs better than current single image super-resolution techniques.

Qi Yang, Dali Chen, Tiebiao Zhao et al.

Over the last decade, it has been demonstrated that many systems in science and engineering can be modeled more accurately by fractional-order than integer-order derivatives, and many methods are developed to solve the problem of fractional systems. Due to the extra free parameter order, fractional-order based methods provide additional degree of freedom in optimization performance. Not surprisingly, many fractional-order based methods have been used in image processing field. Herein recent studies are reviewed in ten sub-fields, which include image enhancement, image denoising, image edge detection, image segmentation, image registration, image recognition, image fusion, image encryption, image compression and image restoration. In sum, it is well proved that as a fundamental mathematic tool, fractional-order derivative shows great success in image processing.