arXiv subjects

Qian Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Qian Liu.

At least 271 records · Page 15Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Spatiotemporal Patterns of COVID-19 Impact on Human Activities and Environment in China Using Nighttime Light and Air Quality Data

In order to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on people's lives, activities and the natural environment, this paper investigates the spatial and temporal characteristics of Night Time Light (NTL) radiance and Air Quality Index (AQI) before and during the pandemic in mainland China. Our results show that the monthly average NTL brightness is much lower during the quarantine period than before. This study categorizes NTL into three classes: residential area, transportation and public facilities and commercial centers, with NTL radiance ranges of 5-20, 20-40 and greater than 40 nW/(cm*cm*sr), respectively. We found that the Number Of Pixels (NOP) with NTL detection increased in the residential area and decreased in the commercial centers for most of the provinces after the shutdown, while transportation and public facilities generally stayed the same. More specifically, we examined these factors in Wuhan, where the first confirmed cases were reported, and where the earliest quarantine measures were taken. Observations and analysis of pixels associated with commercial centers were observed to have lower NTL radiance values, indicating a dimming behavior, while residential area pixels recorded increased levels of brightness, after the beginning of the lockdown. The study also discovered a significant decreasing trend in the daily average AQI for the whole country, with cleaner air in most provinces during February and March, compared to January 2020. In conclusion, the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 has had a crucial impact on people's daily lives and activity ranges through the increased implementation of lockdown and quarantine policies. On the other hand, the air quality of China has improved with the reduction of non-essential industries and motor vehicle usage.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

You Impress Me: Dialogue Generation via Mutual Persona Perception

Despite the continuing efforts to improve the engagingness and consistency of chit-chat dialogue systems, the majority of current work simply focus on mimicking human-like responses, leaving understudied the aspects of modeling understanding between interlocutors. The research in cognitive science, instead, suggests that understanding is an essential signal for a high-quality chit-chat conversation. Motivated by this, we propose P^2 Bot, a transmitter-receiver based framework with the aim of explicitly modeling understanding. Specifically, P^2 Bot incorporates mutual persona perception to enhance the quality of personalized dialogue generation. Experiments on a large public dataset, Persona-Chat, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, with a considerable boost over the state-of-the-art baselines across both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

CTM: Collaborative Temporal Modeling for Action Recognition

With the rapid development of digital multimedia, video understanding has become an important field. For action recognition, temporal dimension plays an important role, and this is quite different from image recognition. In order to learn powerful feature of videos, we propose a Collaborative Temporal Modeling (CTM) block (Figure 1) to learn temporal information for action recognition. Besides a parameter-free identity shortcut, as a separate temporal modeling block, CTM includes two collaborative paths: a spatial-aware temporal modeling path, which we propose the Temporal-Channel Convolution Module (TCCM) with unshared parameters for each spatial position (H*W) to build, and a spatial-unaware temporal modeling path. CTM blocks can seamlessly be inserted into many popular networks to generate CTM Networks and bring the capability of learning temporal information to 2D CNN backbone networks, which only capture spatial information. Experiments on several popular action recognition datasets demonstrate that CTM blocks bring the performance improvements on 2D CNN baselines, and our method achieves the competitive results against the state-of-the-art methods. Code will be made publicly available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

iqiyi Submission to ActivityNet Challenge 2019 Kinetics-700 challenge: Hierarchical Group-wise Attention

In this report, the method for the iqiyi submission to the task of ActivityNet 2019 Kinetics-700 challenge is described. Three models are involved in the model ensemble stage: TSN, HG-NL and StNet. We propose the hierarchical group-wise non-local (HG-NL) module for frame-level features aggregation for video classification. The standard non-local (NL) module is effective in aggregating frame-level features on the task of video classification but presents low parameters efficiency and high computational cost. The HG-NL method involves a hierarchical group-wise structure and generates multiple attention maps to enhance performance. Basing on this hierarchical group-wise structure, the proposed method has competitive accuracy, fewer parameters and smaller computational cost than the standard NL. For the task of ActivityNet 2019 Kinetics-700 challenge, after model ensemble, we finally obtain an averaged top-1 and top-5 error percentage 28.444% on the test set.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Tuning Non-Gilbert-type damping in FeGa films on MgO(001) via oblique deposition

The ability to tailor the damping factor is essential for spintronic and spin-torque applications. Here, we report an approach to manipulate the damping factor of FeGa/MgO(001) films by oblique deposition. Owing to the defects at the surface or interface in thin films, two-magnon scattering (TMS) acts as a non-Gilbert damping mechanism in magnetization relaxation. In this work, the contribution of TMS was characterized by in-plane angular dependent ferromagnetic resonance (FMR). It is demonstrated that the intrinsic Gilbert damping is isotropic and invariant, while the extrinsic mechanism related to TMS is anisotropic and can be tuned by oblique deposition. Furthermore, the two and fourfold TMS related to the uniaxial magnetic anisotropy (UMA) and magnetocrystalline anisotropy were discussed. Our results open an avenue to manipulate magnetization relaxation in spintronic devices.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2019

Non-Gaussianity in a general kind noncanonical warm inflation

The general kind noncanonical warm inflation is introduced and its total non-Gaussianity of perturbation on uniform energy density hypersurfaces is studied. The total non-Gaussianity contains two complementary parts: the three- and the four-point correlations. The three-point correlation part denoted by $f^{int}_{NL}$, comes from the three-point correlation of inflaton field, while the four-point correlation part, denoted by $f_{NL}^{δN}$, is the contribution due to the four-point correlation function of the inflaton field. The aforementioned two parts of non-Gaussianity in general noncanonical warm inflation are calculated and analysed respectively, and the comparisons and discussions of the two parts are finally carried out in this study.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2019

Tracing magnetic fields by the synergies of synchrotron emission gradients

This paper studies how to employ synchrotron emission gradient techniques to reveal the properties of the magnetic field within the interstellar media. Based on data cubes of three-dimensional numerical simulations of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, we explore spatial gradients of synchrotron emission diagnostics to trace the direction of the magnetic field. According to our simulations, multifarious diagnostics for synchrotron emission can effectively determine the potential direction of projected magnetic fields. Applying the synergies of synchrotron diagnostic gradients to the archive data from the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey, we find that multifarious diagnostic techniques make consistent predictions for the Galactic magnetic field directions. With the high-resolution data presently available from Low Frequency Array for radio astronomy and those in the future from the Square Kilometer Array, the synergies of synchrotron emission gradients are supposed to perform better in tracing the actual direction of interstellar magnetic fields, especially in the low-frequency Faraday rotation regime where traditional synchrotron polarization measure fails.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2019

IRS-Enhanced Wideband MU-MISO-OFDM Communication Systems

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is considered as an enabling technology for future wireless communication systems since it can intelligently change the wireless environment to improve the communication performance. In this paper, an IRS-enhanced wideband multiuser multi-input single-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MU-MISO-OFDM) system is investigated. We aim to jointly design the transmit beamformer and the reflection of IRS to maximize the average sum-rate over all subcarriers. With the aid of the relationship between sum-rate maximization and mean square error (MSE) minimization, an efficient joint beamformer and IRS design algorithm is developed. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed algorithm can offer significant average sum-rate enhancement, which confirms the effectiveness of the use of the IRS for wideband wireless communication systems.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

A Split-and-Recombine Approach for Follow-up Query Analysis

Context-dependent semantic parsing has proven to be an important yet challenging task. To leverage the advances in context-independent semantic parsing, we propose to perform follow-up query analysis, aiming to restate context-dependent natural language queries with contextual information. To accomplish the task, we propose STAR, a novel approach with a well-designed two-phase process. It is parser-independent and able to handle multifarious follow-up scenarios in different domains. Experiments on the FollowUp dataset show that STAR outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by a large margin of nearly 8%. The superiority on parsing results verifies the feasibility of follow-up query analysis. We also explore the extensibility of STAR on the SQA dataset, which is very promising.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Asymptotic spreading of interacting species with multiple fronts I: A geometric optics approach

We establish spreading properties of the Lotka-Volterra competition-diffusion system. When the initial data vanish on a right half-line, we derive the exact spreading speeds and prove the convergence to homogeneous equilibrium states between successive invasion fronts. Our method is inspired by the geometric optics approach for Fisher-KPP equation due to Freidlin, Evans and Souganidis. Our main result settles an open question raised by Shigesada et al. in 1997, and shows that one of the species spreads to the right with a nonlocally pulled front.

math.AP↗

arXiv2019

Enhancement of ultrafast demagnetization rate and Gilbert damping driven by femtosecond laser-induced spin currents in Fe81Ga19/Ir20Mn80 bilayers

In spintronics applications, ultrafast spin dynamics have to be controlled at femtosecond (fs) timescales via fs-laser radiation. At such ultrafast timescales, the effect of the Gilbert damping factor α on ultrafast demagnetization time should be considered. In previous explorations for the relationship between these two parameters, it was found that the theoretical calculations based on the local spin-flip scattering model do not agree with the experimental results. Here, we find that in Fe81Ga19(FeGa)/Ir20Mn80(IrMn) bilayers, the unconventional IrMn thickness dependence of α results from the competition between spin currents pumped from the ferromagnetic (FM) FeGa layer to the antiferromagnetic (AFM) IrMn layer and those pumped from the AFM layer to the FM layer. More importantly, we establish a proportional relationship between the change of the ultrafast demagnetization rate and the enhancement of Gilbert damping induced by the spin currents via interfacial spin chemical potential . Our work builds a bridge to connect the ultrafast demagnetization time and Gilbert damping in ultrafast photo-induced spin currents dominated systems, which not only explains the disagreement between experimental and theoretical results in the relation of τ_M with α, but provides further insight into ultrafast spin dynamics as well.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2019

Hybrid beamforming with dynamic subarrays and low-resolution PSs for mmWave MU-MISO systems

Analog/digital hybrid beamforming architectures with large-scale antenna arrays have been widely considered in millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems because they can address the tradeoff between performance and hardware efficiency compared with traditional fully-digital beamforming. Most of the prior work on hybrid beamforming focused on fullyconnected architecture or partially-connected scheme with fixedsubarrays, in which the analog beamformers are usually realized by infinite-resolution phase shifters (PSs). In this paper, we introduce a novel hybrid beamforming architecture with dynamic subarrays and hardware-efficient low-resolution PSs for mmWave multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems. By dynamically connecting each RF chain to a non-overlap subarray via a switch network and PSs, we can exploit multiple-antenna and multiuser diversities to mitigate the performance loss due to the use of practical low-resolution PSs. An iterative hybrid beamformer design algorithm is first proposed based on fractional programming (FP), aiming at maximizing the sum-rate performance of the MU-MISO system. In an effort to reduce the complexity, we also present a simple heuristic hybrid beamformer design algorithm for the dynamic subarray scheme. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed hybrid beamforming architecture with dynamic subarrays and low-resolution PSs compared to existing fixed-subarray schemes.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Noncollinearity-modulated electronic properties of the monolayer CrI$_3$

Introducing noncollinear magnetization into a monolayer CrI$_3$ is proposed to be an effective approach to modulate the local electronic properties of the two-dimensional (2D) magnetic material. Using first-principles calculation, we illustrate that both the conduction and valence bands in the monolayer CrI$_3$ are lowered down by spin spiral states. The distinct electronic structure of the monolayer noncollinear CrI$_3$ can be applied in nanoscale functional devices. As a proof of concept, we show that a magnetic domain wall can form a one-dimensional conducting channel in the 2D semiconductor via proper gating. Other possible applications such as electron-hole separation and identical quantum dots are also discussed.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2019

Distributed Parameter Estimation Under Event-triggered Communications

In this paper, we study a distributed parameter estimation problem with an asynchronous communication protocol over multi-agent systems. Different from traditional time-driven communication schemes, in this work, data can be transmitted between agents intermittently rather than in a steady stream. First, we propose a recursive distributed estimator based on an event-triggered communication scheme, through which each agent can decide whether the current estimate is sent out to its neighbors or not. With this scheme, considerable communications between agents can be effectively reduced. Then, under mild conditions including a collective observability, we provide a design principle of triggering thresholds to guarantee the asymptotic unbiasedness and strong consistency. Furthermore, under certain conditions, we prove that, with probability one, for every agent the time interval between two successive triggered instants goes to infinity as time goes to infinity. Finally, we provide a numerical simulation to validate the theoretical results of this paper.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2019

FANDA: A Novel Approach to Perform Follow-up Query Analysis

Recent work on Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (NLIDB) has attracted considerable attention. NLIDB allow users to search databases using natural language instead of SQL-like query languages. While saving the users from having to learn query languages, multi-turn interaction with NLIDB usually involves multiple queries where contextual information is vital to understand the users' query intents. In this paper, we address a typical contextual understanding problem, termed as follow-up query analysis. In spite of its ubiquity, follow-up query analysis has not been well studied due to two primary obstacles: the multifarious nature of follow-up query scenarios and the lack of high-quality datasets. Our work summarizes typical follow-up query scenarios and provides a new FollowUp dataset with $1000$ query triples on 120 tables. Moreover, we propose a novel approach FANDA, which takes into account the structures of queries and employs a ranking model with weakly supervised max-margin learning. The experimental results on FollowUp demonstrate the superiority of FANDA over multiple baselines across multiple metrics.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Asymptotic Properties of Distributed Social Sampling Algorithm

Social sampling is a novel randomized message passing protocol inspired by social communication for opinion formation in social networks. In a typical social sampling algorithm, each agent holds a sample from the empirical distribution of social opinions at initial time, and it collaborates with other agents in a distributed manner to estimate the initial empirical distribution by randomly sampling a message from current distribution estimate. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the theoretical properties of the distributed social sampling algorithm over random networks. Firstly, we provide a framework based on stochastic approximation to study the asymptotic properties of the algorithm. Then, under mild conditions, we prove that the estimates of all agents converge to a common random distribution, which is composed of the initial empirical distribution and the accumulation of quantized error. Besides, by tuning algorithm parameters, we prove the strong consistency, namely, the distribution estimates of agents almost surely converge to the initial empirical distribution. Furthermore, the asymptotic normality of estimation error generated by distributed social sampling algorithm is addressed. Finally, we provide a numerical simulation to validate the theoretical results of this paper.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2018

A Hardware-Efficient Hybrid Beamforming Solution for mmWave MIMO Systems

In millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems, existing hybrid beamforming solutions generally require a large number of high-resolution phase shifters (PSs) to realize analog beamformers, which still suffer from high hardware complexity and power consumption. Targeting at this problem, this article introduces a novel hardware-efficient hybrid precoding/combining architecture, which only employs a limited number of simple phase over-samplers (POSs) and a switch (SW) network to achieve maximum hardware efficiency while maintaining satisfactory spectral efficiency performance. The POS can be realized by a simple circuit and simultaneously outputs several parallel signals with different phases. With the aid of a simple switch network, the analog precoder/combiner is implemented by feeding the signals with appropriate phases to antenna arrays or RF chains. We analyze the design challenges of this POS-SW-based hybrid beamforming architecture and present potential solutions to the fundamental issues, especially the precoder/combiner design and the channel estimation strategy. Simulation results demonstrate that this hardware-efficient structure can achieve comparable spectral efficiency but much higher energy efficiency than that of the traditional structures.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

Isotropic non-local Gilbert damping driven by spin currents in epitaxial Pd/Fe/MgO(001) films

Although both theoretical predications and experimental observations demonstrated that the damping factor is anisotropic at ferromagnet/semiconductor interface with robust interfacial spin-orbit coupling, it is not well understood whether non-local Gilbert damping driven by spin currents in heavy metal/ferromagnetic metal (HM/FM) bilayers is anisotropic or not. Here, we investigated the in-plane angular- and frequency- dependence of magnetic relaxation of epitaxial Fe/MgO(001) films with different capping layers of Pd and Cu. After disentangling the parasitic contributions, such as two-magnon scattering (TMS), mosaicity, and field-dragging effect, we unambiguously observed that both local and non-local Gilbert damping are isotropic in Fe(001) plane, suggesting that the pure spin currents absorption is independent of Fe magnetization orientation in the epitaxial Pd/Fe heterostructure. First principles calculation reveals that the effective spin mixing conductance of Pd/Fe interface is nearly invariant for different magnetization directions in good agreement with the experimental observations. These results offer a valuable insight into the transmission and absorption of pure spin currents, and facilitate us to utilize next-generation spintronic devices.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗