arXiv subjects

Xu Qin

Publications and source records attributed to Xu Qin.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Development and Application of an eV Neutron Polarization for Parity Violation Studies at CSNS Back-n Beamline

The dynamic enhancement of symmetry-breaking effects in neutron-nucleus resonances provides a sensitive testing ground for Time-Reversal Invariance Violation (TRIV). Exploiting this mechanism, the Neutron Optics Parity and Time Reversal Experiment (NOPTREX) seeks to elucidate the origin of the universe's baryon asymmetry. Critical to this effort is the precise measurement of Parity Violation (PV) asymmetries, which is essential to calibrate the nuclear parameters required for future TRIV experiments. To facilitate these studies, we developed an eV polarized neutron at the Back-n white neutron beamline of the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS). Neutron polarization is generated by an in-situ Spin-Exchange Optical Pumping (SEOP) $^3$He filter. Spin manipulation is performed by an adiabatic spin flipper, while spin polarization is preserved over the flight path by a vacuum transport system equipped with a solenoidal guide field. Experiments successfully measured an asymmetry of approximately $7.8 \pm 2.4$ (stat.) $\pm 0.3$ (sys.) % at the 0.747 eV p-wave resonance of $^{139}$La. These results are in agreement with previous results on this resonance and validate the system's capability for PV measurements.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2025

Two-Phase Treatment with Noncompliance: Identifying the Cumulative Average Treatment Effect via Multisite Instrumental Variables

When evaluating a two-phase intervention, the cumulative average treatment effect (ATE) is often the primary causal estimand of interest. However, some individuals who do not respond well to the Phase I treatment may subsequently display noncompliant behaviors. At the same time, exposure to the Phase I treatment is expected to directly influence an individual's potential outcomes, thereby violating the exclusion restriction. Building on an instrumental variable (IV) strategy for multisite trials, we clarify the conditions under which the cumulative ATE of a two-phase treatment can be identified by employing the random assignment of the Phase I treatment as the instrument. Our strategy relaxes both the conventional exclusion restriction and sequential ignorability assumptions. We assess the performance of the new strategy through simulation studies. Additionally, we reanalyze data from the Tennessee class size study, in which students and teachers were randomly assigned to either small or regular class types in kindergarten (Phase I) with noncompliance emerging in Grade 1 (Phase II). Applying our new strategy, we estimate the cumulative ATE of receiving two consecutive years of instruction in a small versus regular class.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

Polarization-Analyzed Small-Angle Neutron Scattering with an $\textit{in-situ}$ $^{3}$He neutron spin filter at the China Spallation Neutron Source

Polarization-analyzed small-angle neutron scattering (PASANS) is an advanced technique that enables the selective investigation of magnetic scattering phenomena in magnetic materials and distinguishes coherent scattering obscured by incoherent backgrounds, making it particularly valuable for cutting-edge research. The successful implementation of PASANS in China was achieved for the first time at the newly commissioned Very Small Angle Neutron Scattering (VSANS) instrument at the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS). This technique employs a combination of a double-V cavity supermirror polarizer and a radio frequency (RF) neutron spin flipper to manipulate the polarization of the incident neutrons. The scattered neutron polarization is stably analyzed by a specially designed $\textit{in-situ}$ optical pumping $^{3}$He neutron spin filter, which covers a spatially symmetric scattering angle coverage of about 4.8 $^{\circ}$. A comprehensive PASANS data reduction method, aimed at pulsed neutron beams, has been established and validated with a silver behenate powder sample, indicating a maximum momentum transfer coverage of approximately 0.25 {\AA} $^{-1}$.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2023

Mediation Analysis using Semi-parametric Shape-Restricted Regression with Applications

Often linear regression is used to perform mediation analysis. However, in many instances, the underlying relationships may not be linear, as in the case of placental-fetal hormones and fetal development. Although, the exact functional form of the relationship may be unknown, one may hypothesize the general shape of the relationship. For these reasons, we develop a novel shape-restricted inference-based methodology for conducting mediation analysis. This work is motivated by an application in fetal endocrinology where researchers are interested in understanding the effects of pesticide application on birth weight, with human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) as the mediator. We assume a practically plausible set of nonlinear effects of hCG on the birth weight and a linear relationship between pesticide exposure and hCG, with both exposure-outcome and exposure-mediator models being linear in the confounding factors. Using the proposed methodology on a population-level prenatal screening program data, with hCG as the mediator, we discovered that, while the natural direct effects suggest a positive association between pesticide application and birth weight, the natural indirect effects were negative.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2022

Estimation and Sensitivity Analysis for Causal Decomposition in Heath Disparity Research

In the field of disparities research, there has been growing interest in developing a counterfactual-based decomposition analysis to identify underlying mediating mechanisms that help reduce disparities in populations. Despite rapid development in the area, most prior studies have been limited to regression-based methods, undermining the possibility of addressing complex models with multiple mediators and/or heterogeneous effects. We propose an estimation method that effectively addresses complex models. Moreover, we develop a novel sensitivity analysis for possible violations of identification assumptions. The proposed method and sensitivity analysis are demonstrated with data from the Midlife Development in the US study to investigate the degree to which disparities in cardiovascular health at the intersection of race and gender would be reduced if the distributions of education and perceived discrimination were the same across intersectional groups.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2021

Post-Treatment Confounding in Causal Mediation Studies: A Cutting-Edge Problem and A Novel Solution via Sensitivity Analysis

In causal mediation studies that decompose an average treatment effect into a natural indirect effect (NIE) and a natural direct effect (NDE), examples of post-treatment confounding are abundant. Past research has generally considered it infeasible to adjust for a post-treatment confounder of the mediator-outcome relationship due to incomplete information: it is observed under the actual treatment condition while missing under the counterfactual treatment condition. This study proposes a new sensitivity analysis strategy for handling post-treatment confounding and incorporates it into weighting-based causal mediation analysis without making extra identification assumptions. Under the sequential ignorability of the treatment assignment and of the mediator, we obtain the conditional distribution of the post-treatment confounder under the counterfactual treatment as a function of not just pretreatment covariates but also its counterpart under the actual treatment. The sensitivity analysis then generates a bound for the NIE and that for the NDE over a plausible range of the conditional correlation between the post-treatment confounder under the actual and that under the counterfactual conditions. Implemented through either imputation or integration, the strategy is suitable for binary as well as continuous measures of post-treatment confounders. Simulation results demonstrate major strengths and potential limitations of this new solution. A re-analysis of the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS) Riverside data reveals that the initial analytic results are sensitive to omitted post-treatment confounding.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2020

NASNet: A Neuron Attention Stage-by-Stage Net for Single Image Deraining

Images captured under complicated rain conditions often suffer from noticeable degradation of visibility. The rain models generally introduce diversity visibility degradation, which includes rain streak, rain drop as well as rain mist. Numerous existing single image deraining methods focus on the only one type rain model, which does not have strong generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Neuron Attention Stage-by-Stage Net (NASNet), which can solve all types of rain model tasks efficiently. For one thing, we pay more attention on the Neuron relationship and propose a lightweight Neuron Attention (NA) architectural mechanism. It can adaptively recalibrate neuron-wise feature responses by modelling interdependencies and mutual influence between neurons. Our NA architecture consists of Depthwise Conv and Pointwise Conv, which has slight computation cost and higher performance than SE block by our contrasted experiments. For another, we propose a stage-by-stage unified pattern network architecture, the stage-by-stage strategy guides the later stage by incorporating the useful information in previous stage. We concatenate and fuse stage-level information dynamically by NA module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed NASNet significantly outperforms the state-of-theart methods by a large margin in terms of both quantitative and qualitative measures on all six public large-scale datasets for three rain model tasks.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2019

FFA-Net: Feature Fusion Attention Network for Single Image Dehazing

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end feature fusion at-tention network (FFA-Net) to directly restore the haze-free image. The FFA-Net architecture consists of three key components: 1) A novel Feature Attention (FA) module combines Channel Attention with Pixel Attention mechanism, considering that different channel-wise features contain totally different weighted information and haze distribution is uneven on the different image pixels. FA treats different features and pixels unequally, which provides additional flexibility in dealing with different types of information, expanding the representational ability of CNNs. 2) A basic block structure consists of Local Residual Learning and Feature Attention, Local Residual Learning allowing the less important information such as thin haze region or low-frequency to be bypassed through multiple local residual connections, let main network architecture focus on more effective information. 3) An Attention-based different levels Feature Fusion (FFA) structure, the feature weights are adaptively learned from the Feature Attention (FA) module, giving more weight to important features. This structure can also retain the information of shallow layers and pass it into deep layers. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed FFA-Net surpasses previous state-of-the-art single image dehazing methods by a very large margin both quantitatively and qualitatively, boosting the best published PSNR metric from 30.23db to 36.39db on the SOTS indoor test dataset. Code has been made available at GitHub.

cs.CV↗