e-ISSN: Pending

Browse the failure-mode index

715 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Computer Science · Negative / Null Result Report. Search the index →

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record compiled from open scholarly databases; the abstract is shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed, otherwise a short excerpt under fair use. Classifications are automated and approximate.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Haptic human-human interaction does not improve individual visuomotor adaptation

Niek Beckers, Edwin van Asseldonk, Herman van der Kooij · 2020 · arXiv

Haptic interaction between two humans, for example, a physiotherapist assisting a patient regaining the ability to grasp a cup, likely facilitates motor skill acquisition. Haptic human-human interaction has been shown to enhance individual performance improvement in a tracking task with a visuomotor rotation perturbation. These results are remarkable given that haptically assisting or guiding an individual rarely benefits their individual improvement when the assistance is removed. We, therefore, replicated a study that reported that haptic interaction between humans was beneficial for individ

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Framing Effects on Privacy Concerns about a Home Telepresence Robot

Matthew Rueben, Frank J. Bernieri, Cindy M. Grimm et al. · 2019 · arXiv

Privacy-sensitive robotics is an emerging area of HRI research. Judgments about privacy would seem to be context-dependent, but none of the promising work on contextual "frames" has focused on privacy concerns. This work studies the impact of contextual "frames" on local users' privacy judgments in a home telepresence setting. Our methodology consists of using an online questionnaire to collect responses to animated videos of a telepresence robot after framing people with an introductory paragraph. The results of four studies indicate a large effect of manipulating the robot operator's identit

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Understanding Why Generalized Reweighting Does Not Improve Over ERM

Runtian Zhai, Chen Dan, Zico Kolter et al. · 2022 · arXiv

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is known in practice to be non-robust to distributional shift where the training and the test distributions are different. A suite of approaches, such as importance weighting, and variants of distributionally robust optimization (DRO), have been proposed to solve this problem. But a line of recent work has empirically shown that these approaches do not significantly improve over ERM in real applications with distribution shift. The goal of this work is to obtain a comprehensive theoretical understanding of this intriguing phenomenon. We first posit the class o

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Evolution of black hole shadow in the presence of ultralight bosons

Rittick Roy, Urjit A. Yajnik · 2019 · arXiv

Kerr black holes coupled to quantized bosonic fields display a special version of the Hawking effect, governed by the superradiance condition. This leads to rapid growth of boson cloud through spontaneous creation, leading to slowing down of the black hole, and detectable as growth of the black hole shadow. This can be developed into a technique for searching or constraining the existence of ultralight bosons. We study this phenomenon for spin-0 bosons in the shadow of a black hole, with a detailed analysis of Sgr$A^*$, and put estimates on the evolution time scales and subsequent change in th

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Does Weighting Improve Matrix Factorization for Recommender Systems?

Alex Ayoub, Samuel Robertson, Dawen Liang et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Matrix factorization is a widely used approach for top-N recommendation and collaborative filtering. When implemented on implicit feedback data (such as clicks), a common heuristic is to upweight the observed interactions. This strategy has been shown to improve performance for certain algorithms. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study of various weighting schemes and matrix factorization algorithms. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that training with unweighted data can perform comparably to, and sometimes outperform, training with weighted data, especially for large models. This observat

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Aligning to Illusions: Choice Blindness in Human and AI Feedback

Wenbin Wu · 2026 · arXiv

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) assumes annotator preferences reflect stable internal states. We challenge this through three experiments spanning the preference pipeline. In a human choice blindness study, 91% of surreptitiously swapped preferences go undetected, extending choice blindness to third-person evaluative comparison of unfamiliar text. Testing fifteen LLM judges as potential replacements, we find detection relies on shallow text matching rather than genuine self-monitoring: removing prior reasoning from context causes blindness to surge from near-zero to over 50%,

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Coding Schemes with Rate-Limited Feedback that Improve over the Nofeedback Capacity for a Large Class of Broadcast Channels

Youlong Wu, Michèle Wigger · 2014 · arXiv

We propose two coding schemes for the two-receiver discrete memoryless broadcast channel (BC) with rate-limited feedback from one or both receivers. They improve over the nofeedback capacity region for a large class of channels, including the class of \emph{strictly essentially less-noisy BCs} that we introduce in this article. Examples of strictly essentially less-noisy BCs are the binary symmetric BC (BSBC) or the binary erasure BC (BEBC) with unequal cross-over or erasure probabilities at the two receivers. When the feedback rates are sufficiently large, our schemes recover all previously k

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

When is dataset cartography ineffective? Using training dynamics does not improve robustness against Adversarial SQuAD

Paul K. Mandal · 2025 · arXiv

In this paper, I investigate the effectiveness of dataset cartography for extractive question answering on the SQuAD dataset. I begin by analyzing annotation artifacts in SQuAD and evaluate the impact of two adversarial datasets, AddSent and AddOneSent, on an ELECTRA-small model. Using training dynamics, I partition SQuAD into easy-to-learn, ambiguous, and hard-to-learn subsets. I then compare the performance of models trained on these subsets to those trained on randomly selected samples of equal size. Results show that training on cartography-based subsets does not improve generalization to

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Does Interaction Improve Bayesian Reasoning with Visualization?

Ab Mosca, Alvitta Ottley, Remco Chang · 2021 · arXiv

Interaction enables users to navigate large amounts of data effectively, supports cognitive processing, and increases data representation methods. However, there have been few attempts to empirically demonstrate whether adding interaction to a static visualization improves its function beyond popular beliefs. In this paper, we address this gap. We use a classic Bayesian reasoning task as a testbed for evaluating whether allowing users to interact with a static visualization can improve their reasoning. Through two crowdsourced studies, we show that adding interaction to a static Bayesian reaso

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Markov-modulated on/off processes for long-range dependent internet traffic

Richard G. Clegg · 2006 · arXiv

The aim of this paper is to use a very simple queuing model to compare a number of models from the literature which have been used to replicate the statistical nature of internet traffic and, in particular, the long-range dependence of this traffic. The four models all have the form of discrete time Markov-modulated processes (two other models are introduced for comparison purposes). While it is often stated that long-range dependence has a critical effect on queuing performance, it appears that the models used here do not well replicated the queuing performance of real internet traffic. In pa

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Area is all you need: repeatable elements make stronger adversarial attacks

Dillon Niederhut · 2023 · arXiv

Over the last decade, deep neural networks have achieved state of the art in computer vision tasks. These models, however, are susceptible to unusual inputs, known as adversarial examples, that cause them to misclassify or otherwise fail to detect objects. Here, we provide evidence that the increasing success of adversarial attacks is primarily due to increasing their size. We then demonstrate a method for generating the largest possible adversarial patch by building a adversarial pattern out of repeatable elements. This approach achieves a new state of the art in evading detection by YOLOv2 a

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards precise baryogenesis in the 2HDM$+a$

T. Gent, S. Huber, K. Mimasu et al. · 2025 · arXiv

We perform a detailed investigation of the viable baryogenesis parameter space of a non-minimal Higgs sector consisting of two Higgs doublets and a singlet pseudoscalar (2HDM$+a$). In such a model, an early Universe period of transient CP violation may occur, driven by a nonvanishing vacuum expectation value of the CP-odd scalar $a$. This naturally avoids the stringent electric dipole moment experimental constraints on beyond-the-Standard-Model sources of CP violation. We provide a state-of-art computation of the baryon asymmetry, providing several important improvements over existing baryogen

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Peer Grading in a Course on Algorithms and Data Structures: Machine Learning Algorithms do not Improve over Simple Baselines

Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Morteza Alamgir, Ulrike von Luxburg · 2015 · arXiv

Peer grading is the process of students reviewing each others' work, such as homework submissions, and has lately become a popular mechanism used in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Intrigued by this idea, we used it in a course on algorithms and data structures at the University of Hamburg. Throughout the whole semester, students repeatedly handed in submissions to exercises, which were then evaluated both by teaching assistants and by a peer grading mechanism, yielding a large dataset of teacher and peer grades. We applied different statistical and machine learning methods to aggregate t

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Batch normalization does not improve initialization

Joris Dannemann, Gero Junike · 2025 · arXiv

Batch normalization is one of the most important regularization techniques for neural networks, significantly improving training by centering the layers of the neural network. There have been several attempts to provide a theoretical justification for batch ormalization. Santurkar and Tsipras (2018) [How does batch normalization help optimization? Advances in neural information rocessing systems, 31] claim that batch normalization improves initialization. We provide a counterexample showing that this claim s not true, i.e., batch normalization does not improve initialization.

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

S2-BNN: Bridging the Gap Between Self-Supervised Real and 1-bit Neural Networks via Guided Distribution Calibration

Zhiqiang Shen, Zechun Liu, Jie Qin et al. · 2021 · arXiv

Previous studies dominantly target at self-supervised learning on real-valued networks and have achieved many promising results. However, on the more challenging binary neural networks (BNNs), this task has not yet been fully explored in the community. In this paper, we focus on this more difficult scenario: learning networks where both weights and activations are binary, meanwhile, without any human annotated labels. We observe that the commonly used contrastive objective is not satisfying on BNNs for competitive accuracy, since the backbone network contains relatively limited capacity and re

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

MedNet-PVS: A MedNeXt-Based Deep Learning Model for Automated Segmentation of Perivascular Spaces

Zhen Xuen Brandon Low, Rory Zhang, Hang Min et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Enlarged perivascular spaces (PVS) are increasingly recognized as biomarkers of cerebral small vessel disease, Alzheimer's disease, stroke, and aging-related neurodegeneration. However, manual segmentation of PVS is time-consuming and subject to moderate inter-rater reliability, while existing automated deep learning models have moderate performance and typically fail to generalize across diverse clinical and research MRI datasets. We adapted MedNeXt-L-k5, a Transformer-inspired 3D encoder-decoder convolutional network, for automated PVS segmentation. Two models were trained: one using a homog

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Neural document expansion for ad-hoc information retrieval

Cheng Tang, Andrew Arnold · 2020 · arXiv

Recently, Nogueira et al. [2019] proposed a new approach to document expansion based on a neural Seq2Seq model, showing significant improvement on short text retrieval task. However, this approach needs a large amount of in-domain training data. In this paper, we show that this neural document expansion approach can be effectively adapted to standard IR tasks, where labels are scarce and many long documents are present.

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On an Improvement over Rényi's Equivocation Bound

Nandakishore Santhi, Alexander Vardy · 2006 · arXiv

We consider the problem of estimating the probability of error in multi-hypothesis testing when MAP criterion is used. This probability, which is also known as the Bayes risk is an important measure in many communication and information theory problems. In general, the exact Bayes risk can be difficult to obtain. Many upper and lower bounds are known in literature. One such upper bound is the equivocation bound due to Rényi which is of great philosophical interest because it connects the Bayes risk to conditional entropy. Here we give a simple derivation for an improved equivocation bound. We

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Effect of Static vs. Conversational AI-Generated Messages on Colorectal Cancer Screening Intent: a Randomized Controlled Trial

Neil K. R. Sehgal, Manuel Tonneau, Andy Tan et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Large language model (LLM) chatbots show increasing promise in persuasive communication. Yet their real-world utility remains uncertain, particularly in clinical settings where sustained conversations are difficult to scale. In a pre-registered randomized controlled trial, we enrolled 915 U.S. adults (ages 45-75) who had never completed colorectal cancer (CRC) screening. Participants were randomized to: (1) no message control, (2) expert-written patient materials, (3) single AI-generated message, or (4) a motivational interviewing chatbot. All participants were required to remain in their assi

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

An Improvement Over Threads Communications on Multi-Core Processors

Reza Fotohi, Mehdi Effatparvar, Fateme Sarkohaki et al. · 2019 · arXiv

Multicore is an integrated circuit chip that uses two or more computational engines (cores) places in a single processor. This new approach is used to split the computational work of a threaded application and spread it over multiple execution cores, so that the computer system can benefits from a better performance and better responsiveness of the system. A thread is a unit of execution inside a process that is created and maintained to execute a set of actions/ instructions. Threads can be implemented differently from an operating system to another, but the operating system is in most cases

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Min-p, Max Exaggeration: A Critical Analysis of Min-p Sampling in Language Models

Rylan Schaeffer, Joshua Kazdan, Yegor Denisov-Blanch · 2025 · arXiv

Sampling from language models impacts the quality and diversity of outputs, affecting both research and real-world applications. Recently, Nguyen et al. 2024's "Turning Up the Heat: Min-p Sampling for Creative and Coherent LLM Outputs" introduced a new sampler called min-p, claiming it achieves superior quality and diversity over established samplers such as basic, top-k, and top-p sampling. The significance of these claims was underscored by the paper's recognition as the 18th highest-scoring submission to ICLR 2025 and selection for an Oral presentation. This paper conducts a comprehensive r

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Coherent-Classical Estimation versus Purely-Classical Estimation for Linear Quantum Systems

Shibdas Roy, Ian R. Petersen, Elanor H. Huntington · 2014 · arXiv

We consider a coherent-classical estimation scheme for a class of linear quantum systems. It comprises an estimator that is a mixed quantum-classical system without involving coherent feedback. The estimator yields a classical estimate of a variable for the quantum plant. We demonstrate that for a passive plant that can be characterized by annihilation operators only, such coherent-classical estimation provides no improvement over purely-classical estimation. An example is also given which shows that if the plant is not assumed to be an annihilation operator only quantum system, it is possible

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Benchmarking Pretrained Molecular Embedding Models For Molecular Representation Learning

Mateusz Praski, Jakub Adamczyk, Wojciech Czech · 2025 · arXiv

Pretrained neural networks have attracted significant interest in chemistry and small molecule drug design. Embeddings from these models are widely used for molecular property prediction, virtual screening, and small data learning in molecular chemistry. This study presents the most extensive comparison of such models to date, evaluating 25 models across 25 datasets. Under a fair comparison framework, we assess models spanning various modalities, architectures, and pretraining strategies. Using a dedicated hierarchical Bayesian statistical testing model, we arrive at a surprising result: nearl

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Covering models of the asymmetric quantum Rabi model: $η$-shifted non-commutative harmonic oscillators

Cid Reyes-Bustos, Masato Wakayama · 2022 · arXiv

The non-commutative harmonic oscillator (NCHO) is a matrix valued differential operator originally introduced as a generalization of the quantum harmonic oscillator having a weaker $\mathfrak{sl}_2(\mathbb{R})$-symmetry. The spectrum of the NCHO has remarkable properties, including the presence of number theoretical structures such as modular forms, elliptic curves and Eichler cohomology observed in the special values of the associated spectral zeta function. In addition, the Heun ODE picture of the eigenvalue problem of the NCHO reveals a connection with the quantum Rabi model (QRM), a fundam

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Bridging the Gap: Transfer Learning from English PLMs to Malaysian English

Mohan Raj Chanthran, Lay-Ki Soon, Huey Fang Ong et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Malaysian English is a low resource creole language, where it carries the elements of Malay, Chinese, and Tamil languages, in addition to Standard English. Named Entity Recognition (NER) models underperform when capturing entities from Malaysian English text due to its distinctive morphosyntactic adaptations, semantic features and code-switching (mixing English and Malay). Considering these gaps, we introduce MENmBERT and MENBERT, a pre-trained language model with contextual understanding, specifically tailored for Malaysian English. We have fine-tuned MENmBERT and MENBERT using manually annot

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The Capacity of MIMO Channels with Per-Antenna Power Constraint

Mai Vu · 2011 · arXiv

We establish the optimal input signaling and the capacity of MIMO channels under per-antenna power constraint. While admitting a linear eigenbeam structure, the optimal input is no longer diagonalizable by the channel right singular vectors as with sum power constraint. We formulate the capacity optimization as an SDP problem and solve in closed-form the optimal input covariance as a function of the dual variable. We then design an efficient algorithm to find this optimal input signaling for all channel sizes. The proposed algorithm allows for straightforward implementation in practical system

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Loose LIPS Sink Ships: Asking Questions in Battleship with Language-Informed Program Sampling

Gabriel Grand, Valerio Pepe, Jacob Andreas et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Questions combine our mastery of language with our remarkable facility for reasoning about uncertainty. How do people navigate vast hypothesis spaces to pose informative questions given limited cognitive resources? We study these tradeoffs in a classic grounded question-asking task based on the board game Battleship. Our language-informed program sampling (LIPS) model uses large language models (LLMs) to generate natural language questions, translate them into symbolic programs, and evaluate their expected information gain. We find that with a surprisingly modest resource budget, this simple M

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On the Effectiveness of Mode Exploration in Bayesian Model Averaging for Neural Networks

John T. Holodnak, Allan B. Wollaber · 2021 · arXiv

Multiple techniques for producing calibrated predictive probabilities using deep neural networks in supervised learning settings have emerged that leverage approaches to ensemble diverse solutions discovered during cyclic training or training from multiple random starting points (deep ensembles). However, only a limited amount of work has investigated the utility of exploring the local region around each diverse solution (posterior mode). Using three well-known deep architectures on the CIFAR-10 dataset, we evaluate several simple methods for exploring local regions of the weight space with re

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards Single Exponential Time for Temporal and Spatial Reasoning: A Study via Redundancy and Dynamic Programming

Victor Lagerkvist, Johanna Groven, Leif Eriksson · 2026 · arXiv

The region connection calculus ($RCC$) and Allen's interval algebra ($IA$) are two well-known NP-hard spatial-temporal qualitative reasoning problems. They are solvable in $2^{O(n \log n)}$ time, where $n$ is the number of variables, and $IA$ is additionally known to be solvable in $o(n)^n$ time. However, no improvement over exhaustive search is known for $RCC$, and if they are also solvable in single exponential time $2^{O(n)}$ is unknown. We investigate multiple avenues towards reaching such bounds. First, we show that branching is insufficient since there are too many non-redundant constrai

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

TSA-WF: Exploring the Effectiveness of Time Series Analysis for Website Fingerprinting

Michael Wrana, Uzma Maroof, Diogo Barradas · 2025 · arXiv

Website fingerprinting (WF) is a technique that allows an eavesdropper to determine the website a target user is accessing by inspecting the metadata associated with the packets she exchanges via some encrypted tunnel, e.g., Tor. Recent WF attacks built using machine learning (and deep learning) process and summarize trace metadata during their feature extraction phases. This methodology leads to predictions that lack information about the instant at which a given website is detected within a (potentially large) network trace comprised of multiple sequential website accesses -- a setting known

View details →