arXiv subjects

Qing Han

Publications and source records attributed to Qing Han.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Blow-up sets of Ricci curvatures of complete conformal metrics

A version of the singular Yamabe problem in smooth domains in a closed manifold yields complete conformal metrics with negative constant scalar curvatures. In this paper, we study the blow-up phenomena of Ricci curvatures of these metrics on domains whose boundary is close to a certain limit set of a lower dimension. We will characterize the blow-up set according to the Yamabe invariant of the underlying manifold. In particular, we will prove that all points in the lower dimension part of the limit set belong to the blow-up set on manifolds not conformally equivalent to the standard sphere and that all but one point in the lower dimension part of the limit set belong to the blow-up set on manifolds conformally equivalent to the standard sphere. In certain cases, the blow-up set can be the entire manifold. We will demonstrate by examples that these results are optimal.

math.DG↗

arXiv2023

Isometric immersions and applications

We provide an introduction to the old-standing problem of isometric immersions. We combine a historical account of its multifaceted advances, which have fascinated geometers and analysts alike, with some of the applications in the mathematical physics and mathematical materials science, old and new.

math.DG↗

arXiv2023

Adaptive hedging horizon and hedging performance estimation

In this study, we constitute an adaptive hedging method based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method to extract the adaptive hedging horizon and build a time series cross-validation method for robust hedging performance estimation. Basing on the variance reduction criterion and the value-at-risk (VaR) criterion, we find that the estimation of in-sample hedging performance is inconsistent with that of the out-sample hedging performance. The EMD hedging method family exhibits superior performance on the VaR criterion compared with the minimum variance hedging method. The matching degree of the spot and futures contracts at the specific time scale is the key determinant of the hedging performance in the corresponding hedging horizon.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2022

Task Space Tracking of Soft Manipulators: Inner-Outer Loop Control Based on Cosserat-Rod Models

Soft robots are robotic systems made of deformable materials and exhibit unique flexibility that can be exploited for complex environments and tasks. However, their control problem has been considered a challenging subject because they are of infinite degrees of freedom and highly under-actuated. Existing studies have mainly relied on simplified and approximated finite-dimensional models. In this work, we exploit infinite-dimensional nonlinear control for soft robots. We adopt the Cosserat-rod theory and employ nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) to model the kinematics and dynamics of soft manipulators, including their translational motions (for shear and elongation) and rotational motions (for bending and torsion). The objective is to achieve position tracking of the whole manipulator in a planar task space by controlling the moments (generated by actuators). The control design is inspired by the energy decay property of damped wave equations and has an inner-outer loop structure. In the outer loop, we design desired rotational motions that rotate the translational component into a direction that asymptotically dissipates the energy associated with position tracking errors. In the inner loop, we design inputs for the rotational components to track their desired motions, again by dissipating the rotational energy. We prove that the closed-loop system is exponentially stable and evaluate its performance through simulations.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Asymptotics and convergence for the complex Monge-Ampere equation

We study the asymptotics of complete Kaehler-Einstein metrics on strictly pseudoconvex domains in C^n and derive a convergence theorem for solutions to the corresponding Monge-Ampere equation. If only a portion of the boundary is analytic, the solutions satisfy Gevrey type estimates for tangential derivatives. A counterexample for the model linearized equation suggests that there is no local convergence theorem for the complex Monge-Ampere equation

math.AP↗

arXiv2022

Boundary regularity of minimal graphs in the hyperbolic space

F.-H. Lin studied minimal graphs of the Dirichlet problem in the hyperbolic space and proved that any such minimal graph has the same global regularity as the boundary if the dimension of the minimal graph is even and that there is an obstacle to the higher regularity if the dimension is odd. We discuss the odd dimension case and study how the higher regularity is obstructed. We introduce the logarithm of the distance to the boundary as an additional independent self-variable and establish concise boundary regularity for the minimal graph.

math.AP↗

arXiv2022

Backstepping Mean-Field Density Control for Large-Scale Heterogeneous Nonlinear Stochastic Systems

This work studies the problem of controlling the mean-field density of large-scale stochastic systems, which has applications in various fields such as swarm robotics. Recently, there is a growing amount of literature that employs mean-field partial differential equations (PDEs) to model the density evolution and uses density feedback to design control laws which, by acting on individual systems, stabilize their density towards a target profile. In spite of its stability property and computational efficiency, the success of density feedback relies on assuming the systems to be homogeneous first-order integrators (plus white noise) and ignores higher-order dynamics, making it less applicable in practice. In this work, we present a backstepping design algorithm that extends density control to heterogeneous and higher-order stochastic systems in strict-feedback forms. We show that the strict-feedback form in the individual level corresponds to, in the collective level, a PDE (of densities) distributedly driven by a collection of heterogeneous stochastic systems. The presented backstepping design then starts with a density feedback design for the PDE, followed by a sequence of stabilizing design for the remaining stochastic systems. We present a candidate control law with stability proof and apply it to nonholonomic mobile robots. A simulation is included to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2022

Feedback Interconnected Mean-Field Density Estimation and Control

Swarm robotic systems have foreseeable applications in the near future. Recently, there has been an increasing amount of literature that employs mean-field partial differential equations (PDEs) to model the time-evolution of the probability density of swarm robotic systems and uses density feedback to design stabilizing control laws that act on individuals such that their density converges to a target profile. However, it remains largely unexplored considering problems of how to estimate the mean-field density, how the density estimation algorithms affect the control performance, and whether the estimation performance in turn depends on the control algorithms. In this work, we focus on studying the interplay of these algorithms. Specifically, we propose new density control laws which use the mean-field density and its gradient as feedback, and prove that they are globally input-to-state stable (ISS) with respect to estimation errors. Then, we design filtering algorithms to estimate the density and its gradient separately, and prove that these estimates are convergent assuming the control laws are known. Finally, we show that the feedback interconnection of these estimation and control algorithms is still globally ISS, which is attributed to the bilinearity of the PDE system. An agent-based simulation is included to verify the stability of these algorithms and their feedback interconnection.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2022

Studying the mixed transmission in a community with age heterogeneity: COVID-19 as a case study

COVID-19 has been prevalent worldwide for about 2 years now and has brought unprecedented challenges to our society. Before vaccines were available, the main disease intervention strategies were non-pharmaceutical. Starting December 2020, in Ontario, Canada, vaccines were approved for administering to vulnerable individuals and gradually expanded to all individuals above the age of 12. As the vaccine coverage reached a satisfactory level among the eligible population, normal social activities resumed and schools reopened starting September 2021. However, when schools reopen for in-person learning, children under the age of 12 are unvaccinated and are at higher risks of contracting the virus. We propose an age-stratified model based on the age and vaccine eligibility of the individuals. We fit our model to the data in Ontario, Canada and obtain a good fitting result. The results show that a relaxed between-group contact rate may trigger future epidemic waves more easily than an increased within-group contact rate. An increasing mixed contact rate of the older group quickly amplifies the daily incidence numbers for both groups whereas an increasing mixed contact rate of the younger group mainly leads to future waves in the younger group alone. The results indicate the importance of accelerating vaccine rollout for younger individuals in mitigating disease spread.

math.DS↗

arXiv2021

Geometric mechanics of random kirigami

The presence of cuts in a thin planar sheet can dramatically alter its mechanical and geometrical response to loading, as the cuts allow the sheet to deform strongly in the third dimension. We use numerical experiments to characterize the geometric mechanics of kirigamized sheets as a function of the number, size and orientation of cuts. We show that the geometry of mechanically loaded sheets can be approximated as a composition of simple developable units: flats, cylinders, cones and compressed Elasticae. This geometric construction yields simple scaling laws for the mechanical response of the sheet in both the weak and strongly deformed limit. In the ultimately stretched limit, this further leads to a theorem on the nature and form of geodesics in an arbitrary kirigami pattern, consistent with observations and simulations. By varying the shape and size of the geodesic in a kirigamized sheet, we show that we can control the deployment trajectory of the sheet, and thence its functional properties as a robotic gripper or a soft light window. Overall our study of random kirigami sets the stage for controlling the shape and shielding the stresses in thin sheets using cuts.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2021

A PubMedBERT-based Classifier with Data Augmentation Strategy for Detecting Medication Mentions in Tweets

As a major social media platform, Twitter publishes a large number of user-generated text (tweets) on a daily basis. Mining such data can be used to address important social, public health, and emergency management issues that are infeasible through other means. An essential step in many text mining pipelines is named entity recognition (NER), which presents some special challenges for tweet data. Among them are nonstandard expressions, extreme imbalanced classes, and lack of context information, etc. The track 3 of BioCreative challenge VII (BC7) was organized to evaluate methods for detecting medication mentions in tweets. In this paper, we report our work on BC7 track 3, where we explored a PubMedBERT-based classifier trained with a combination of multiple data augmentation approaches. Our method achieved an F1 score of 0.762, which is substantially higher than the mean of all submissions (0.696).

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Distributed Mean-Field Density Estimation for Large-Scale Systems

This work studies how to estimate the mean-field density of large-scale systems in a distributed manner. Such problems are motivated by the recent swarm control technique that uses mean-field approximations to represent the collective effect of the swarm, wherein the mean-field density (especially its gradient) is usually used in feedback control design. In the first part, we formulate the density estimation problem as a filtering problem of the associated mean-field partial differential equation (PDE), for which we employ kernel density estimation (KDE) to construct noisy observations and use filtering theory of PDE systems to design an optimal (centralized) density filter. It turns out that the covariance operator of observation noise depends on the unknown density. Hence, we use approximations for the covariance operator to obtain a suboptimal density filter, and prove that both the density estimates and their gradient are convergent and remain close to the optimal one using the notion of input-to-state stability (ISS). In the second part, we continue to study how to decentralize the density filter such that each agent can estimate the mean-field density based on only its own position and local information exchange with neighbors. We prove that the local density filter is also convergent and remains close to the centralized one in the sense of ISS. Simulation results suggest that the centralized suboptimal density filter is able to generate convergent density estimates, and the local density filter is able to converge and remain close to the centralized filter.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2021

The Shuffle Variant of a Diophantine equation of Miyazaki and Togbé

In 2012, T. Miyazaki and A. Togbé gave all of the solutions of the Diophantine equations $(2am-1)^x+(2m)^y=(2am+1)^z$ and $b^x+2^y=(b+2)^z$ in positive integers $x,y,z,$ $a>1$ and $b\ge 5$ odd. In this paper, we propose a similar problem (which we call the shuffle variant of a Diophantine equation of Miyazaki and Togbé). Here we first prove that the Diophantine equation $(2am+1)^x+(2m)^y=(2am-1)^z$ has only the solutions $(a, m, x, y, z)=(2, 1, 2, 1, 3)$ and $(2,1,1,2,2)$ in positive integers $a>1,m,x,y,z$. Then using this result, we show that the Diophantine equation $b^x+2^y=(b-2)^z$ has only the solutions $(b,x, y, z)=(5, 2, 1, 3)$ and $(5,1,2,2)$ in positive integers $x,y,z$ and $b$ odd.

math.NT↗

arXiv2021

Anisotropic Dynamical Horizons Arising in Gravitational Collapse

For the study of $3+1$ dimensional Einstein vacuum equations (EVEs), substantial progress has been made recently on the problem of trapped surface formation. However, very limited knowledge of existence and associated properties is acquired on the boundary of the emerged trapped region, i.e., the apparent horizon, which is composed of marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTSs) and is of great physical importance. In this paper, concerning this emerged apparent horizon we prove a folklore conjecture relating to both cosmic censorship and black hole thermodynamics. In a framework set up by Christodoulou and under a general anisotropic condition introduced by Klainerman, Luk and Rodnianski, for $3+1$ EVEs we prove that in the process of gravitational collapse, a smooth and spacelike apparent horizon (dynamical horizon) emerges from general (both isotropic and anisotropic) initial data. This dynamical horizon censors singularities formed in gravitational collapse from non-trapped local observers near the center, and it also enables the extension of black hole thermodynamical theory along the apparent horizon to anisotropic scenarios. Our analysis builds on scale-critical hyperbolic method and non-perturbative elliptic techniques. New observations and equation structures are exploited. Geometrically, we furthermore construct explicit finger-type single and multi-valley anisotropic apparent horizons. They are the first mathematical examples of the anisotropic MOTS and the anisotropic apparent horizon formed in dynamics, which have potential applications in geometric analysis, black hole mechanics, numerical relativity and gravitational wave phenomenology.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2021

Geodesics and isometric immersions in kirigami

Kirigami is the art of cutting paper to make it articulated and deployable, allowing for it to be shaped into complex two and three-dimensional geometries. The mechanical response of a kirigami sheet when it is pulled at its ends is enabled and limited by the presence of cuts that serve to guide the possible non-planar deformations. Inspired by the geometry of this art form, we ask two questions: (i) What is the shortest path between points at which forces are applied? (ii) What is the nature of the ultimate shape of the sheet when it is strongly stretched? Mathematically, these questions are related to the nature and form of geodesics in the Euclidean plane with linear obstructions (cuts), and the nature and form of isometric immersions of the sheet with cuts when it can be folded on itself. We provide a constructive proof that the geodesic connecting any two points in the plane is piecewise polygonal. We then prove that the family of polygonal geodesics can be simultaneously rectified into a straight line by flat-folding the sheet so that its configuration is a (non-unique) piecewise affine planar isometric immersion.

math.DG↗

arXiv2021

Transporting Robotic Swarms via Mean-Field Feedback Control

With the rapid development of AI and robotics, transporting a large swarm of networked robots has foreseeable applications in the near future. Existing research in swarm robotics has mainly followed a bottom-up philosophy with predefined local coordination and control rules. However, it is arduous to verify the global requirements and analyze their performance. This motivates us to pursue a top-down approach, and develop a provable control strategy for deploying a robotic swarm to achieve a desired global configuration. Specifically, we use mean-field partial differential equations (PDEs) to model the swarm and control its mean-field density (i.e., probability density) over a bounded spatial domain using mean-field feedback. The presented control law uses density estimates as feedback signals and generates corresponding velocity fields that, by acting locally on individual robots, guide their global distribution to a target profile. The design of the velocity field is therefore centralized, but the implementation of the controller can be fully distributed -- individual robots sense the velocity field and derive their own velocity control signals accordingly. The key contribution lies in applying the concept of input-to-state stability (ISS) to show that the perturbed closed-loop system (a nonlinear and time-varying PDE) is locally ISS with respect to density estimation errors. The effectiveness of the proposed control laws is verified using agent-based simulations.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2020

The Loewner-Nirenberg Problem in Cones

We study asymptotic behaviors of solutions to the Loewner-Nirenberg problem in finite cones and establish optimal asymptotic expansions in terms of the corresponding solutions in infinite cones. The spherical domains over which cones are formed are allowed to have singularities. An elliptic operator on such spherical domains with coefficients singular on boundary play an important role. Due to the singularity of the spherical domains, extra cares are needed for the study of the global regularity of the eigenfunctions and solutions of the associated singular Dirichlet problem.

math.AP↗

arXiv2020

On The Negativity of Ricci Curvatures of Complete Conformal Metrics

A version of the singular Yamabe problem in bounded domains yields complete conformal metrics with negative constant scalar curvatures. In this paper, we study whether these metrics have negative Ricci curvatures. Affirmatively, we prove that these metrics indeed have negative Ricci curvatures in bounded convex domains in the Euclidean space. On the other hand, we provide a general construction of domains in compact manifolds and demonstrate that the negativity of Ricci curvatures does not hold if the boundary is close to certain sets of low dimension. The expansion of the Green's function and the positive mass theorem play essential roles in certain cases.

math.DG↗