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Yichen Li

Publications and source records attributed to Yichen Li.

123 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

Detector optimization to reduce the cosmogenic neutron backgrounds in the TAO experiment

Short-baseline reactor antineutrino experiments with shallow overburden usually have large cosmogenic neutron backgrounds. The Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO) is a ton-level liquid scintillator detector located at about 30 m from a core of the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant. It will measure the reactor antineutrino spectrum with high precision and high energy resolution to provide a reference spectrum for JUNO and other reactor antineutrino experiments, and provide a benchmark measurement to test nuclear databases. Background is one of the critical concerns of TAO since the overburden is just 10 meter-water-equivalent. The cosmogenic neutron background was estimated to be ~10% of signals. With detailed Monte Carlo simulations, we propose several measures in this work to reduce the neutron backgrounds, including doping Gadolinium in the buffer liquid, adding a polyethylene layer above the bottom lead shield, and optimization of the veto strategy. With these improvements, the neutron background-to-signal ratio can be reduced to ~2%, and might be further suppressed with pulse shape discrimination.

physics.ins-det↗

Performance Analysis of SPAD-Based Optical Wireless Communication with OFDM

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) in optical wireless communication (OWC). SPAD operates in the Geiger mode and can act as a photon counting receiver obviating the need for a transimpedance amplifier (TIA). Although a SPAD receiver can provide higher sensitivity compared to the traditional linear photodetectors, it suffers from the dead-time-induced nonlinearity. To improve the data rates of SPAD-based OWC systems, optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) can be employed. This paper provides a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the SPAD-based OWC systems using OFDM signalling considering the effects of signal clipping, SPAD nonlinearity, and signal-dependent shot noise. An equivalent additive Gaussian noise channel model is proposed to describe the performance of the SPAD-based OFDM system. The statistics of the proposed channel model and the analytical expressions of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and bit error rate (BER) are derived in closed forms. By means of extensive numerical results, the impact of the unique receiver nonlinearity on the system performance is investigated. The results demonstrate new insights into different optical power regimes of reliable operation for SPAD-based OFDM systems even well beyond SPAD saturation level.

cs.IT↗

Calibration Strategy of the JUNO-TAO Experiment

The Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (JUNO-TAO, or TAO) is a satellite detector for the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO). Located near the Taishan reactor, TAO independently measures the reactor's antineutrino energy spectrum with unprecedented energy resolution. To achieve this goal, energy response must be well calibrated. Using the Automated Calibration Unit (ACU) and the Cable Loop System (CLS) of TAO, multiple radioactive sources are deployed to various positions in the detector to perform a precise calibration of energy response. The non-linear energy response can be controlled within 0.6% with different energy points of these radioactive sources. It can be further improved by using $^{12}\rm B$ decay signals produced by cosmic muons. Through the energy non-uniformity calibration, residual non-uniformity is less than 0.2%. The energy resolution degradation and energy bias caused by the residual non-uniformity can be controlled within 0.05% and 0.3%, respectively. In addition, the stability of other detector parameters, such as the gain of each silicon photo-multiplier, can be monitored with a special ultraviolet LED calibration system.

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Revisiting, Benchmarking and Exploring API Recommendation: How Far Are We?

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which encapsulate the implementation of specific functions as interfaces, greatly improve the efficiency of modern software development. As numbers of APIs spring up nowadays, developers can hardly be familiar with all the APIs, and usually need to search for appropriate APIs for usage. So lots of efforts have been devoted to improving the API recommendation task. However, it has been increasingly difficult to gauge the performance of new models due to the lack of a uniform definition of the task and a standardized benchmark. For example, some studies regard the task as a code completion problem; while others recommend relative APIs given natural language queries. To reduce the challenges and better facilitate future research, in this paper, we revisit the API recommendation task and aim at benchmarking the approaches. Specifically, the paper groups the approaches into two categories according to the task definition, i.e., query-based API recommendation and code-based API recommendation. We study 11 recently-proposed approaches along with 4 widely-used IDEs. One benchmark named as APIBench is then built for the two respective categories of approaches. Based on APIBench, we distill some actionable insights and challenges for API recommendation. We also achieve some implications and directions for improving the performance of recommending APIs, including data source selection, appropriate query reformulation, low resource setting, and cross-domain adaptation.

cs.SE↗

Towards Making Deep Learning-based Vulnerability Detectors Robust

Automatically detecting software vulnerabilities in source code is an important problem that has attracted much attention. In particular, deep learning-based vulnerability detectors, or DL-based detectors, are attractive because they do not need human experts to define features or patterns of vulnerabilities. However, such detectors' robustness is unclear. In this paper, we initiate the study in this aspect by demonstrating that DL-based detectors are not robust against simple code transformations, dubbed attacks in this paper, as these transformations may be leveraged for malicious purposes. As a first step towards making DL-based detectors robust against such attacks, we propose an innovative framework, dubbed ZigZag, which is centered at (i) decoupling feature learning and classifier learning and (ii) using a ZigZag-style strategy to iteratively refine them until they converge to robust features and robust classifiers. Experimental results show that the ZigZag framework can substantially improve the robustness of DL-based detectors.

cs.CR↗

Modeling impurity concentrations in liquid argon detectors

Impurities in noble liquid detectors used for neutrino and dark matter experiments can significantly impact the quality of data. We present an experimentally verified model for describing the dynamics of impurity distributions in liquid argon (LAr) detectors. The model considers sources, sinks, and transport of impurities within and between the gas and liquid argon phases. Measurements of oxygen concentrations in a 20-L LAr multi-purpose test stand are compared to calculations made with this model to show that an accurate description of the concentrations under various operational conditions can be obtained. A result of this analysis is a determination of Henry's coefficient for oxygen in LAr. These calculations also show that some processes have small effects on the impurity dynamics and excluding them yields a solution as a sum of two exponential terms. This solution provides a simple way to extract Henry's coefficient with negligible approximation error. It is applied to the data and the Henry's coefficient for oxygen in LAr is obtained as 0.84$^{+0.09}_{-0.05}$, consistent with literature results. Based on the analysis of the data with the model, we further suggest that, for a large liquid argon detector, barriers to flow ("baffles") installed in the gas phase to restrict flow can help reduce the ultimate impurity concentration in the LAr.

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Revisiting Image-Language Networks for Open-ended Phrase Detection

Most existing work that grounds natural language phrases in images starts with the assumption that the phrase in question is relevant to the image. In this paper we address a more realistic version of the natural language grounding task where we must both identify whether the phrase is relevant to an image and localize the phrase. This can also be viewed as a generalization of object detection to an open-ended vocabulary, introducing elements of few- and zero-shot detection. We propose an approach for this task that extends Faster R-CNN to relate image regions and phrases. By carefully initializing the classification layers of our network using canonical correlation analysis (CCA), we encourage a solution that is more discerning when reasoning between similar phrases, resulting in over double the performance compared to a naive adaptation on three popular phrase grounding datasets, Flickr30K Entities, ReferIt Game, and Visual Genome, with test-time phrase vocabulary sizes of 5K, 32K, and 159K, respectively.

cs.CV↗

Network Architecture Search for Domain Adaptation

Deep networks have been used to learn transferable representations for domain adaptation. Existing deep domain adaptation methods systematically employ popular hand-crafted networks designed specifically for image-classification tasks, leading to sub-optimal domain adaptation performance. In this paper, we present Neural Architecture Search for Domain Adaptation (NASDA), a principle framework that leverages differentiable neural architecture search to derive the optimal network architecture for domain adaptation task. NASDA is designed with two novel training strategies: neural architecture search with multi-kernel Maximum Mean Discrepancy to derive the optimal architecture, and adversarial training between a feature generator and a batch of classifiers to consolidate the feature generator. We demonstrate experimentally that NASDA leads to state-of-the-art performance on several domain adaptation benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

Domain2Vec: Domain Embedding for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Conventional unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) studies the knowledge transfer between a limited number of domains. This neglects the more practical scenario where data are distributed in numerous different domains in the real world. The domain similarity between those domains is critical for domain adaptation performance. To describe and learn relations between different domains, we propose a novel Domain2Vec model to provide vectorial representations of visual domains based on joint learning of feature disentanglement and Gram matrix. To evaluate the effectiveness of our Domain2Vec model, we create two large-scale cross-domain benchmarks. The first one is TinyDA, which contains 54 domains and about one million MNIST-style images. The second benchmark is DomainBank, which is collected from 56 existing vision datasets. We demonstrate that our embedding is capable of predicting domain similarities that match our intuition about visual relations between different domains. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the power of our new datasets in benchmarking state-of-the-art multi-source domain adaptation methods, as well as the advantage of our proposed model.

cs.CV↗

Learning 3D Part Assembly from a Single Image

Autonomous assembly is a crucial capability for robots in many applications. For this task, several problems such as obstacle avoidance, motion planning, and actuator control have been extensively studied in robotics. However, when it comes to task specification, the space of possibilities remains underexplored. Towards this end, we introduce a novel problem, single-image-guided 3D part assembly, along with a learningbased solution. We study this problem in the setting of furniture assembly from a given complete set of parts and a single image depicting the entire assembled object. Multiple challenges exist in this setting, including handling ambiguity among parts (e.g., slats in a chair back and leg stretchers) and 3D pose prediction for parts and part subassemblies, whether visible or occluded. We address these issues by proposing a two-module pipeline that leverages strong 2D-3D correspondences and assembly-oriented graph message-passing to infer part relationships. In experiments with a PartNet-based synthetic benchmark, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework as compared with three baseline approaches.

cs.CV↗

Learning Domain Adaptive Features with Unlabeled Domain Bridges

Conventional cross-domain image-to-image translation or unsupervised domain adaptation methods assume that the source domain and target domain are closely related. This neglects a practical scenario where the domain discrepancy between the source and target is excessively large. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to learn domain adaptive features between the largely-gapped source and target domains with unlabeled domain bridges. Firstly, we introduce the framework of Cycle-consistency Flow Generative Adversarial Networks (CFGAN) that utilizes domain bridges to perform image-to-image translation between two distantly distributed domains. Secondly, we propose the Prototypical Adversarial Domain Adaptation (PADA) model which utilizes unlabeled bridge domains to align feature distribution between source and target with a large discrepancy. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed models.

cs.CV↗

Performance Analysis of SPAD-based OFDM

In this paper, an analytical approach for the nonlinear distorted bit error rate performance of optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (O-OFDM) with single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) receivers is presented. Major distortion effects of passive quenching (PQ) and active quenching (AQ) SPAD receivers are analysed in this study. The performance analysis of DC-biased O-OFDM and asymmetrically clipped O-OFDM with PQ and AQ SPAD are derived. The comparison results show the maximum optical irradiance caused by the nonlinear distortion, which limits the transmission power and bit rate. The theoretical maximum bit rate of SPAD-based OFDM is found which is up to 1~Gbits/s. This approach supplies a closed-form analytical solution for designing an optimal SPAD-based system.

cs.IT↗

Performance Analysis of Non-DC-Biased OFDM

The performance analysis of a novel optical modulation scheme is presented in this paper. The basic concept is to transmit signs of modulated optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (O-OFDM) symbols and absolute values of the symbols separately by two information carrying units: 1) indices of two light emitting diodes (LED) transmitters that represent positive and negative signs separately; and 2) optical intensity symbols that carry the absolute values of signals. The new approach, referred as to non-DC-biased OFDM (NDC-OFDM), uses the optical spatial modulation (OSM) technique to eliminate the effect of the clipping distortion in DC-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM). In addition, it can achieve similar advantages as the conventional unipolar modulation scheme, asymmetrically clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM), without using additional subcarriers. In this paper, the analytical BER performance is compared with the Monte Carlo result in order to prove the reliability of the new method. Moreover, the practical BER performance of NDC-OFDM with DCO-OFDM and ACO-OFDM is compared for different constellation sizes to verify the improvement of NDC-OFDM on the spectral and power efficiencies.

cs.IT↗

A 20-Liter Test Stand with Gas Purification for Liquid Argon Research

We describe the design of a 20-liter test stand constructed to study fundamental properties of liquid argon (LAr). This system utilizes a simple, cost-effective gas argon (GAr) purification to achieve high purity, which is necessary to study electron transport properties in LAr. An electron drift stack with up to 25 cm length is constructed to study electron drift, diffusion, and attachment at various electric fields. A gold photocathode and a pulsed laser are used as a bright electron source. The operational performance of this system is reported.

physics.ins-det↗

Measurement of Longitudinal Electron Diffusion in Liquid Argon

We report the measurement of longitudinal electron diffusion coefficients in liquid argon for electric fields between 100 and 2000 V/cm with a gold photocathode as a bright electron source. The measurement principle, apparatus, and data analysis are described. Our results, which are consistent with previous measurements in the region between 100 to 350 V/cm [1] , are systematically higher than the prediction of Atrazhev-Timoshkin[2], and represent the world's best measurement in the region between 350 to 2000 V/cm. The quantum efficiency of the gold photocathode, the drift velocity and longitudinal diffusion coefficients in gas argon are also presented.

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