Gang Cao

Haochen Zhu, Gang Cao, Mo Zhao

With the widespread use of powerful image editing tools, image tampering becomes easy and realistic. Existing image forensic methods still face challenges of low generalization performance and robustness. In this letter, we propose an effective image tampering localization scheme based on ConvNeXt network and multi-scale feature fusion. Stacked ConvNeXt blocks are used as an encoder to capture hierarchical multi-scale features, which are then fused in decoder for locating tampered pixels accurately. Combined loss and effective data augmentation are adopted to further improve the model performance. Extensive experimental results show that localization performance of our proposed scheme outperforms other state-of-the-art ones. The source code will be available at https://github.com/ZhuHC98/ITL-SSN.

Zijie Lou, Gang Cao, Man Lin

Visually realistic GAN-generated facial images raise obvious concerns on potential misuse. Many effective forensic algorithms have been developed to detect such synthetic images in recent years. It is significant to assess the vulnerability of such forensic detectors against adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a new black-box attack method against GAN-generated image detectors. A novel contrastive learning strategy is adopted to train the encoder-decoder network based anti-forensic model under a contrastive loss function. GAN images and their simulated real counterparts are constructed as positive and negative samples, respectively. Leveraging on the trained attack model, imperceptible contrastive perturbation could be applied to input synthetic images for removing GAN fingerprint to some extent. As such, existing GAN-generated image detectors are expected to be deceived. Extensive experimental results verify that the proposed attack effectively reduces the accuracy of three state-of-the-art detectors on six popular GANs. High visual quality of the attacked images is also achieved. The source code will be available at https://github.com/ZXMMD/BAttGAND.

Kun Guo, Haochen Zhu, Gang Cao

Powerful manipulation techniques have made digital image forgeries be easily created and widespread without leaving visual anomalies. The blind localization of tampered regions becomes quite significant for image forensics. In this paper, we propose an effective image tampering localization network (EITLNet) based on a two-branch enhanced transformer encoder with attention-based feature fusion. Specifically, a feature enhancement module is designed to enhance the feature representation ability of the transformer encoder. The features extracted from RGB and noise streams are fused effectively by the coordinate attention-based fusion module at multiple scales. Extensive experimental results verify that the proposed scheme achieves the state-of-the-art generalization ability and robustness in various benchmark datasets. Code will be public at https://github.com/multimediaFor/EITLNet.

Xiaonan Nie, Xupeng Miao, Zilong Wang et al.

With the increasing data volume, there is a trend of using large-scale pre-trained models to store the knowledge into an enormous number of model parameters. The training of these models is composed of lots of dense algebras, requiring a huge amount of hardware resources. Recently, sparsely-gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) are becoming more popular and have demonstrated impressive pretraining scalability in various downstream tasks. However, such a sparse conditional computation may not be effective as expected in practical systems due to the routing imbalance and fluctuation problems. Generally, MoEs are becoming a new data analytics paradigm in the data life cycle and suffering from unique challenges at scales, complexities, and granularities never before possible. In this paper, we propose a novel DNN training framework, FlexMoE, which systematically and transparently address the inefficiency caused by dynamic dataflow. We first present an empirical analysis on the problems and opportunities of training MoE models, which motivates us to overcome the routing imbalance and fluctuation problems by a dynamic expert management and device placement mechanism. Then we introduce a novel scheduling module over the existing DNN runtime to monitor the data flow, make the scheduling plans, and dynamically adjust the model-to-hardware mapping guided by the real-time data traffic. A simple but efficient heuristic algorithm is exploited to dynamically optimize the device placement during training. We have conducted experiments on both NLP models (e.g., BERT and GPT) and vision models (e.g., Swin). And results show FlexMoE can achieve superior performance compared with existing systems on real-world workloads -- FlexMoE outperforms DeepSpeed by 1.70x on average and up to 2.10x, and outperforms FasterMoE by 1.30x on average and up to 1.45x.

Haochen Zhu, Gang Cao, Xianglin Huang

Blind detection of the forged regions in digital images is an effective authentication means to counter the malicious use of local image editing techniques. Existing encoder-decoder forensic networks overlook the fact that detecting complex and subtle tampered regions typically requires more feedback information. In this paper, we propose a Progressive FeedbACk-enhanced Transformer (ProFact) network to achieve coarse-to-fine image forgery localization. Specifically, the coarse localization map generated by an initial branch network is adaptively fed back to the early transformer encoder layers, which can enhance the representation of positive features while suppressing interference factors. The cascaded transformer network, combined with a contextual spatial pyramid module, is designed to refine discriminative forensic features for improving the forgery localization accuracy and reliability. Furthermore, we present an effective strategy to automatically generate large-scale forged image samples close to real-world forensic scenarios, especially in realistic and coherent processing. Leveraging on such samples, a progressive and cost-effective two-stage training protocol is applied to the ProFact network. The extensive experimental results on nine public forensic datasets show that our proposed localizer greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art on the generalization ability and robustness of image forgery localization. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/multimediaFor/ProFact.

Gang Cao, Edmund M-K Lai, Fakhrul Alam

Model Predictive Control (MPC) of an unknown system that is modelled by Gaussian Process (GP) techniques is studied in this paper. Using GP, the variances computed during the modelling and inference processes allow us to take model uncertainty into account. The main issue in using MPC to control systems modelled by GP is the propagation of such uncertainties within the control horizon. In this paper, two approaches to solve this problem, called GPMPC1 and GPMPC2, are proposed. With GPMPC1, the original Stochastic Model Predictive Control (SMPC) problem is relaxed to a deterministic nonlinear MPC based on a basic linearized GP local model. The resulting optimization problem, though non-convex, can be solved by the Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP). By incorporating the model variance into the state vector, an extended local model is derived. This model allows us to relax the non-convex MPC problem to a convex one which can be solved by an active-set method efficiently. The performance of both approaches is demonstrated by applying them to two trajectory tracking problems. Results show that both GPMPC1 and GPMPC2 produce effective controls but GPMPC2 is much more efficient computationally.

Man Lin, Gang Cao, Zijie Lou

Digital video splicing has become easy and ubiquitous. Malicious users copy some regions of a video and paste them to another video for creating realistic forgeries. It is significant to blindly detect such forgery regions in videos. In this paper, a spatio-temporal co-attention fusion network (SCFNet) is proposed for video splicing localization. Specifically, a three-stream network is used as an encoder to capture manipulation traces across multiple frames. The deep interaction and fusion of spatio-temporal forensic features are achieved by the novel parallel and cross co-attention fusion modules. A lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) decoder is adopted to yield a pixel-level tampering localization map. A new large-scale video splicing dataset is created for training the SCFNet. Extensive tests on benchmark datasets show that the localization and generalization performances of our SCFNet outperform the state-of-the-art. Code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/multimediaFor/SCFNet.

Shunlai Cui, Peng Cao, Yuan Zhu et al.

LiDAR model selection is a critical issue in roadside sensing systems, as it directly determines both perception capability and deployment cost. However, the lack of empirical benchmarks for comparing perception performance across different LiDAR configurations has greatly constrained scientific sensor selection and deployment planning. To address this gap, we present MR-LiDAR, a controlled multi-resolution LiDAR benchmark for roadside perception diagnostics. Using 16-, 32-, 80-, and 128-beam LiDARs in identical roadside scenarios, we collect point clouds and ground-truth annotations for diverse traffic participants, including vehicles and vulnerable road users (VRUs), across varying distances. This controlled design isolates intrinsic LiDAR specifications, particularly beam count and beam distribution, as the key variables for precise performance diagnostics. Based on MR-LiDAR, we conduct systematic empirical analyses to examine how beam count, beam distribution, target distance, object category, and vehicle occlusion affect LiDAR perception performance. The results reveal that all of these factors have substantial impacts. In particular, contrary to the common assumption that higher beam counts always yield better perception, we show that an 80-beam LiDAR with optimized beam distribution can match or even outperform a 128-beam LiDAR with uniform beam distribution. In addition, we provide a practical reference guide for LiDAR selection, including target point-count statistics and detection performance comparisons based on two widely used detection algorithms. This work offers a diagnostic benchmark and practical guidance for determining cost-effective LiDAR configurations in roadside perception applications.

Yuqi Wang, Gang Cao, Zijie Lou et al.

It is significant to evaluate the security of existing digital image tampering localization algorithms in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose an adversarial attack scheme to reveal the reliability of such tampering localizers, which would be fooled and fail to predict altered regions correctly. Specifically, the adversarial examples based on optimization and gradient are implemented for white/black-box attacks. Correspondingly, the adversarial example is optimized via reverse gradient propagation, and the perturbation is added adaptively in the direction of gradient rising. The black-box attack is achieved by relying on the transferability of such adversarial examples to different localizers. Extensive evaluations verify that the proposed attack sharply reduces the localization accuracy while preserving high visual quality of the attacked images.

Dezhi Ran, Zhi Gong, Yuzhe Guo et al.

While Large Language Model (LLM) agents show great potential for automated UI navigation such as automated UI testing and AI assistants, their efficiency has been largely overlooked. Our motivating study reveals that inefficient UI representation creates a critical performance bottleneck. However, UI representation optimization, formulated as the task of automatically generating programs that transform UI representations, faces two unique challenges. First, the lack of Boolean oracles, which traditional program synthesis uses to decisively validate semantic correctness, poses a fundamental challenge to co-optimization of token efficiency and completeness. Second, the need to process large, complex UI trees as input while generating long, compositional transformation programs, making the search space vast and error-prone. Toward addressing the preceding limitations, we present UIFormer, the first automated optimization framework that synthesizes UI transformation programs by conducting constraint-based optimization with structured decomposition of the complex synthesis task. First, UIFormer restricts the program space using a domain-specific language (DSL) that captures UI-specific operations. Second, UIFormer conducts LLM-based iterative refinement with correctness and efficiency rewards, providing guidance for achieving the efficiency-completeness co-optimization. UIFormer operates as a lightweight plugin that applies transformation programs for seamless integration with existing LLM agents, requiring minimal modifications to their core logic. Evaluations across three UI navigation benchmarks spanning Android and Web platforms with five LLMs demonstrate that UIFormer achieves 48.7% to 55.8% token reduction with minimal runtime overhead while maintaining or improving agent performance. Real-world industry deployment at WeChat further validates the practical impact of UIFormer.

Kun Guo, Gang Cao, Zijie Lou et al.

Current image tampering localization methods primarily rely on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers. While CNNs suffer from limited local receptive fields, Transformers offer global context modeling at the expense of quadratic computational complexity. Recently, the state space model Mamba has emerged as a competitive alternative, enabling linear-complexity global dependency modeling. Inspired by it, we propose a lightweight and effective FORensic network based on vision MAmba (ForMa) for blind image tampering localization. Firstly, ForMa captures multi-scale global features that achieves efficient global dependency modeling through linear complexity. Then the pixel-wise localization map is generated by a lightweight decoder, which employs a parameter-free pixel shuffle layer for upsampling. Additionally, a noise-assisted decoding strategy is proposed to integrate complementary manipulation traces from tampered images, boosting decoder sensitivity to forgery cues. Experimental results on 10 standard datasets demonstrate that ForMa achieves state-of-the-art generalization ability and robustness, while maintaining the lowest computational complexity. Code is available at https://github.com/multimediaFor/ForMa.

Zijie Lou, Gang Cao, Kun Guo et al.

Pixel dependency modeling from tampered images is pivotal for image forgery localization. Current approaches predominantly rely on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or Transformer-based models, which often either lack sufficient receptive fields or entail significant computational overheads. Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), exemplified by Mamba, have emerged as a promising approach. They not only excel in modeling long-range interactions but also maintain a linear computational complexity. In this paper, we propose LoMa, a novel image forgery localization method that leverages the selective SSMs. Specifically, LoMa initially employs atrous selective scan to traverse the spatial domain and convert the tampered image into ordered patch sequences, and subsequently applies multi-directional state space modeling. In addition, an auxiliary convolutional branch is introduced to enhance local feature extraction. Extensive experimental results validate the superiority of LoMa over CNN-based and Transformer-based state-of-the-arts. To our best knowledge, this is the first image forgery localization model constructed based on the SSM-based model. We aim to establish a baseline and provide valuable insights for the future development of more efficient and effective SSM-based forgery localization models. Code is available at https://github.com/multimediaFor/LoMa.

Jianfa Bai, Man Lin, Gang Cao

The advancement of generation models has led to the emergence of highly realistic artificial intelligence (AI)-generated videos. Malicious users can easily create non-existent videos to spread false information. This letter proposes an effective AI-generated video detection (AIGVDet) scheme by capturing the forensic traces with a two-branch spatio-temporal convolutional neural network (CNN). Specifically, two ResNet sub-detectors are learned separately for identifying the anomalies in spatical and optical flow domains, respectively. Results of such sub-detectors are fused to further enhance the discrimination ability. A large-scale generated video dataset (GVD) is constructed as a benchmark for model training and evaluation. Extensive experimental results verify the high generalization and robustness of our AIGVDet scheme. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/multimediaFor/AIGVDet.

Zijie Lou, Gang Cao, Man Lin

Deep video inpainting is typically used as malicious manipulation to remove important objects for creating fake videos. It is significant to identify the inpainted regions blindly. This letter proposes a simple yet effective forensic scheme for Video Inpainting LOcalization with ContrAstive Learning (ViLocal). Specifically, a 3D Uniformer encoder is applied to the video noise residual for learning effective spatiotemporal forensic features. To enhance the discriminative power, supervised contrastive learning is adopted to capture the local inconsistency of inpainted videos through attracting/repelling the positive/negative pristine and forged pixel pairs. A pixel-wise inpainting localization map is yielded by a lightweight convolution decoder with a specialized two-stage training strategy. To prepare enough training samples, we build a video object segmentation dataset of 2500 videos with pixel-level annotations per frame. Extensive experimental results validate the superiority of ViLocal over state-of-the-arts. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/multimediaFor/ViLocal.

Zijie Lou, Gang Cao, Man Lin

Digital video inpainting techniques have been substantially improved with deep learning in recent years. Although inpainting is originally designed to repair damaged areas, it can also be used as malicious manipulation to remove important objects for creating false scenes and facts. As such it is significant to identify inpainted regions blindly. In this paper, we present a Trusted Video Inpainting Localization network (TruVIL) with excellent robustness and generalization ability. Observing that high-frequency noise can effectively unveil the inpainted regions, we design deep attentive noise learning in multiple stages to capture the inpainting traces. Firstly, a multi-scale noise extraction module based on 3D High Pass (HP3D) layers is used to create the noise modality from input RGB frames. Then the correlation between such two complementary modalities are explored by a cross-modality attentive fusion module to facilitate mutual feature learning. Lastly, spatial details are selectively enhanced by an attentive noise decoding module to boost the localization performance of the network. To prepare enough training samples, we also build a frame-level video object segmentation dataset of 2500 videos with pixel-level annotation for all frames. Extensive experimental results validate the superiority of TruVIL compared with the state-of-the-arts. In particular, both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on various inpainted videos verify the remarkable robustness and generalization ability of our proposed TruVIL. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/multimediaFor/TruVIL.

Zijie Lou, Gang Cao, Kun Guo et al.

Image forgery localization, which aims to segment tampered regions in an image, is a fundamental yet challenging digital forensic task. While some deep learning-based forensic methods have achieved impressive results, they directly learn pixel-to-label mappings without fully exploiting the relationship between pixels in the feature space. To address such deficiency, we propose a Multi-view Pixel-wise Contrastive algorithm (MPC) for image forgery localization. Specifically, we first pre-train the backbone network with the supervised contrastive loss to model pixel relationships from the perspectives of within-image, cross-scale and cross-modality. That is aimed at increasing intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Then the localization head is fine-tuned using the cross-entropy loss, resulting in a better pixel localizer. The MPC is trained on three different scale training datasets to make a comprehensive and fair comparison with existing image forgery localization algorithms. Extensive experiments on the small, medium and large scale training datasets show that the proposed MPC achieves higher generalization performance and robustness against post-processing than the state-of-the-arts. Code will be available at https://github.com/multimediaFor/MPC.

Mengzhou Wu, Yuzhe Guo, Yuan Cao et al.

Scaling generalist GUI agents is hindered by the data scalability bottleneck of expensive human demonstrations and the "distillation ceiling" of synthetic teacher supervision. To transcend these limitations, we propose UI-Oceanus, a framework that shifts the learning focus from mimicking high-level trajectories to mastering interaction physics via ground-truth environmental feedback. Through a systematic investigation of self-supervised objectives, we identify that forward dynamics, defined as the generative prediction of future interface states, acts as the primary driver for scalability and significantly outweighs inverse inference. UI-Oceanus leverages this insight by converting low-cost autonomous exploration, which is verified directly by system execution, into high-density generative supervision to construct a robust internal world model. Experimental evaluations across a series of models demonstrate the decisive superiority of our approach: models utilizing Continual Pre-Training (CPT) on synthetic dynamics outperform non-CPT baselines with an average success rate improvement of 7% on offline benchmarks, which amplifies to a 16.8% gain in real-world online navigation. Furthermore, we observe that navigation performance scales with synthetic data volume. These results confirm that grounding agents in forward predictive modeling offers a superior pathway to scalable GUI automation with robust cross-domain adaptability and compositional generalization.

Yuan Cao, Dezhi Ran, Mengzhou Wu et al.

Post-training GUI agents in interactive environments is critical for developing generalization and long-horizon planning capabilities. However, training on real-world applications is hindered by high latency, poor reproducibility, and unverifiable rewards relying on noisy visual proxies. To address the limitations, we present GUI-GENESIS, the first framework to automatically synthesize efficient GUI training environments with verifiable rewards. GUI-GENESIS reconstructs real-world applications into lightweight web environments using multimodal code models and equips them with code-native rewards, executable assertions that provide deterministic reward signals and eliminate visual estimation noise. Extensive experiments show that GUI-GENESIS reduces environment latency by 10 times and costs by over $28,000 per epoch compared to training on real applications. Notably, agents trained with GUI-GENESIS outperform the base model by 14.54% and even real-world RL baselines by 3.27% on held-out real-world tasks. Finally, we observe that models can synthesize environments they cannot yet solve, highlighting a pathway for self-improving agents.

Weiheng Zhu, Gang Cao, Jing Liu et al.

Recent AI-generated image (AIGI) detectors achieve impressive accuracy under clean condition. In view of antiforensics, it is significant to develop advanced adversarial attacks for evaluating the security of such detectors, which remains unexplored sufficiently. This letter proposes a Dual-domain Feature Importance Attack (DuFIA) scheme to invalidate AIGI detectors to some extent. Forensically important features are captured by the spatially interpolated gradient and frequency-aware perturbation. The adversarial transferability is enhanced by jointly modeling spatial and frequency-domain feature importances, which are fused to guide the optimization-based adversarial example generation. Extensive experiments across various AIGI detectors verify the cross-model transferability, transparency and robustness of DuFIA.

Xiaolong Wei, LiFang Yang, Xianglin Huang et al.

At present, attention mechanism has been widely applied to the fields of deep learning models. Structural models that based on attention mechanism can not only record the relationships between features position, but also can measure the importance of different features based on their weights. By establishing dynamically weighted parameters for choosing relevant and irrelevant features, the key information can be strengthened, and the irrelevant information can be weakened. Therefore, the efficiency of deep learning algorithms can be significantly elevated and improved. Although transformers have been performed very well in many fields including reinforcement learning, there are still many problems and applications can be solved and made with transformers within this area. MARL (known as Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning) can be recognized as a set of independent agents trying to adapt and learn through their way to reach the goal. In order to emphasize the relationship between each MDP decision in a certain time period, we applied the hierarchical coding method and validated the effectiveness of this method. This paper proposed a hierarchical transformers MADDPG based on RNN which we call it Hierarchical RNNs-Based Transformers MADDPG(HRTMADDPG). It consists of a lower level encoder based on RNNs that encodes multiple step sizes in each time sequence, and it also consists of an upper sequence level encoder based on transformer for learning the correlations between multiple sequences so that we can capture the causal relationship between sub-time sequences and make HRTMADDPG more efficient.

Pengpeng Yang, Rongrong Ni, Yao Zhao et al.

Contrast enhancement (CE) forensics techniques have always been of great interest for image forensics community, as they can be an effective tool for recovering image history and identifying tampered images. Although several CE forensic algorithms have been proposed, their accuracy and robustness against some kinds of processing are still unsatisfactory. In order to attenuate such deficiency, in this paper we propose a new framework based on dual-domain fusion convolutional neural network to fuse the features of pixel and histogram domains for CE forensics. Specifically, we first present a pixel-domain convolutional neural network (P-CNN) to automatically capture the patterns of contrast-enhanced images in the pixel domain. Then, we present a histogram-domain convolutional neural network (H-CNN) to extract the features in the histogram domain. The feature representations of pixel and histogram domains are fused and fed into two fully connected layers for the classification of contrast-enhanced images. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieve better performance and is robust against pre-JPEG compression and anti-forensics attacks. In addition, a strategy for performance improvement of CNN-based forensics is explored, which could provide guidance for the design of CNN-based forensics tools.

Gang Cao, Antao Zhou, Xianglin Huang et al.

Resampling detection plays an important role in identifying image tampering, such as image splicing. Currently, the resampling detection is still difficult in recompressed images, which are yielded by applying resampling followed by post-JPEG compression to primary JPEG images. Except for the scenario of low quality primary compression, it remains rather challenging due to the widespread use of middle/high quality compression in imaging devices. In this paper, we propose a new convolution neural network (CNN) method to learn the resampling trace features directly from the recompressed images. To this end, a noise extraction layer based on low-order high pass filters is deployed to yield the image residual domain, which is more beneficial to extract manipulation trace features. A dual-stream CNN is presented to capture the resampling trails along different directions, where the horizontal and vertical streams are interleaved and concatenated. Lastly, the learned features are fed into Sigmoid/Softmax layer, which acts as a binary/multiple classifier for achieving the blind detection and parameter estimation of resampling, respectively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method could detect resampling effectively in recompressed images and outperform the state-of-the-art detectors.

Pengpeng Yang, Rongrong Ni, Yao Zhao et al.

Contrast enhancement (CE) forensics has always been ofconcern to image forensics community. It can provide aneffective tool for recovering image history and identifyingtampered images. Although several CE forensic algorithmshave been proposed, their robustness against some processingis still unsatisfactory, such as JPEG compression and anti-forensic attacks. In order to attenuate such deficiency, inthis paper we first present a discriminability analysis of CEforensics in pixel and gray level histogram domains. Then, insuch two domains, two end-to-end methods based on convo-lutional neural networks (P-CNN, H-CNN) are proposed toachieve robust CE forensics against pre-JPEG compressionand anti-forensics attacks. Experimental results show that theproposed methods achieve much better performance than thestate-of-the-art schemes for CE detection in the case of noother operation and comparable performance when pre-JPEGcompression and anti-foresics attacks is used.

Gang Cao, Huawei Tian, Lifang Yu et al.

In this paper, we propose a general framework to accelerate the universal histogram-based image contrast enhancement (CE) algorithms. Both spatial and gray-level selective down-sampling of digital images are adopted to decrease computational cost, while the visual quality of enhanced images is still preserved and without apparent degradation. Mapping function calibration is novelly proposed to reconstruct the pixel mapping on the gray levels missed by downsampling. As two case studies, accelerations of histogram equalization (HE) and the state-of-the-art global CE algorithm, i.e., spatial mutual information and PageRank (SMIRANK), are presented detailedly. Both quantitative and qualitative assessment results have verified the effectiveness of our proposed CE acceleration framework. In typical tests, computational efficiencies of HE and SMIRANK have been speeded up by about 3.9 and 13.5 times, respectively.

Gang Cao, Lihui Huang, Huawei Tian et al.

As an efficient image contrast enhancement (CE) tool, adaptive gamma correction (AGC) was previously proposed by relating gamma parameter with cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the pixel gray levels within an image. ACG deals well with most dimmed images, but fails for globally bright images and the dimmed images with local bright regions. Such two categories of brightness-distorted images are universal in real scenarios, such as improper exposure and white object regions. In order to attenuate such deficiencies, here we propose an improved AGC algorithm. The novel strategy of negative images is used to realize CE of the bright images, and the gamma correction modulated by truncated CDF is employed to enhance the dimmed ones. As such, local over-enhancement and structure distortion can be alleviated. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that our proposed method yields consistently good CE results.

Gang Cao, Edmund M-K Lai, Fakhrul Alam

Convolved Gaussian Process (CGP) is able to capture the correlations not only between inputs and outputs but also among the outputs. This allows a superior performance of using CGP than standard Gaussian Process (GP) in the modelling of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems when observations are missing for some of outputs. Similar to standard GP, a key issue of CGP is the learning of hyperparameters from a set of input-output observations. It typically performed by maximizing the Log-Likelihood (LL) function which leads to an unconstrained nonlinear and non-convex optimization problem. Algorithms such as Conjugate Gradient (CG) or Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) are commonly used but they often get stuck in local optima, especially for CGP where there are more hyperparameters. In addition, the LL value is not a reliable indicator for judging the quality intermediate models in the optimization process. In this paper, we propose to use enhanced Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms to solve this problem by minimizing the model output error instead. This optimization criterion enables the quality of intermediate solutions to be directly observable during the optimization process. Two enhancements to the standard PSO algorithm which make use of gradient information and the multi- start technique are proposed. Simulation results on the modelling of both linear and nonlinear systems demonstrate the effectiveness of minimizing the model output error to learn hyperparameters and the performance of using enhanced algorithms.

Gang Cao, Edmund M-K Lai, Fakhrul Alam

The Model Predictive Control (MPC) trajectory tracking problem of an unmanned quadrotor with input and output constraints is addressed. In this article, the dynamic models of the quadrotor are obtained purely from operational data in the form of probabilistic Gaussian Process (GP) models. This is different from conventional models obtained through Newtonian analysis. A hierarchical control scheme is used to handle the trajectory tracking problem with the translational subsystem in the outer loop and the rotational subsystem in the inner loop. Constrained GP based MPC are formulated separately for both subsystems. The resulting MPC problems are typically nonlinear and non-convex. We derived 15 a GP based local dynamical model that allows these optimization problems to be relaxed to convex ones which can be efficiently solved with a simple active-set algorithm. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with an existing unconstrained Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC). Simulation results show that the two approaches exhibit similar trajectory tracking performance. However, our approach has the advantage of incorporating constraints on the control inputs. In addition, our approach only requires 20% of the computational time for NMPC.