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694 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

Multi-level algorithms for modularity clustering

Andreas Noack, Randolf Rotta · 2008 · arXiv

Modularity is one of the most widely used quality measures for graph clusterings. Maximizing modularity is NP-hard, and the runtime of exact algorithms is prohibitive for large graphs. A simple and effective class of heuristics coarsens the graph by iteratively merging clusters (starting from singletons), and optionally refines the resulting clustering by iteratively moving individual vertices between clusters. Several heuristics of this type have been proposed in the literature, but little is known about their relative performance. This paper experimentally compares existing and new coarsenin

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Bounded Memory Active Learning through Enriched Queries

Max Hopkins, Daniel Kane, Shachar Lovett et al. · 2021 · arXiv

The explosive growth of easily-accessible unlabeled data has lead to growing interest in active learning, a paradigm in which data-hungry learning algorithms adaptively select informative examples in order to lower prohibitively expensive labeling costs. Unfortunately, in standard worst-case models of learning, the active setting often provides no improvement over non-adaptive algorithms. To combat this, a series of recent works have considered a model in which the learner may ask enriched queries beyond labels. While such models have seen success in drastically lowering label costs, they tend

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Teleportation of Hybrid Entangled States with Continuous-Variable Entanglement

Mingjian He, Robert Malaney · 2022 · arXiv

Hybrid entanglement between discrete-variable (DV) and continuous-variable (CV) quantum systems is an essential resource for heterogeneous quantum networks. Our previous work showed that in lossy channels the teleportation of DV qubits, via CV-entangled states, can be significantly improved by a new protocol defined by a modified Bell state measurement at the sender. This work explores whether a new, similarly modified, CV-based teleportation protocol can lead to improvement in the transfer of hybrid entangled states. To set the scene, we first determine the performance of such a modified prot

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Monte-Carlo Planning: Theoretically Fast Convergence Meets Practical Efficiency

Zohar Feldman, Carmel Domshlak · 2013 · arXiv

Popular Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithms for online planning, such as epsilon-greedy tree search and UCT, aim at rapidly identifying a reasonably good action, but provide rather poor worst-case guarantees on performance improvement over time. In contrast, a recently introduced MCTS algorithm BRUE guarantees exponential-rate improvement over time, yet it is not geared towards identifying reasonably good choices right at the go. We take a stand on the individual strengths of these two classes of algorithms, and show how they can be effectively connected. We then rationalize a principle

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Rumour Evaluation with Very Large Language Models

Dahlia Shehata, Robin Cohen, Charles Clarke · 2024 · arXiv

Conversational prompt-engineering-based large language models (LLMs) have enabled targeted control over the output creation, enhancing versatility, adaptability and adhoc retrieval. From another perspective, digital misinformation has reached alarming levels. The anonymity, availability and reach of social media offer fertile ground for rumours to propagate. This work proposes to leverage the advancement of prompting-dependent LLMs to combat misinformation by extending the research efforts of the RumourEval task on its Twitter dataset. To the end, we employ two prompting-based LLM variants (GP

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

An efficient magic state approach to small angle rotations

Earl T. Campbell, Joe O'Gorman · 2016 · arXiv

Standard error correction techniques only provide a quantum memory and need extra gadgets to perform computation. Central to quantum algorithms are small angle rotations, which can be fault-tolerantly implemented given a supply of an unconventional species of magic state. We present a low-cost distillation routine for preparing these small angle magic states. Our protocol builds on the work of Duclos-Cianci and Poulin [Phys. Rev. A, 91, 042315 (2015)] by compressing their circuit. Additionally, we present a method of diluting magic states that reduces costs associated with very small angle rot

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Stochastic dynamics of storm surge with stable noise

Joshua Frankie Rayo, Vena Pearl Boñgolan · 2020 · arXiv

The Advanced Circulation (ADCIRC) and Simulating Nearshore Waves (SWAN) coupled model is modified to include a stochastic term in the shallow water equations that represents random external forces from debris carried by surge and short-term local scale atmospheric fluctuations. We added $α$-stable noise, uncorrelated in space and time, in the forcing terms of the coupled model. Inputs to the model are unstructured computational mesh derived from topography and bathymetry, land cover classification, tidal potential constituents and atmospheric forcing. The model simulated surge height of around

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On the impossibility of a quantum sieve algorithm for graph isomorphism: unconditional results

Cristopher Moore, Alexander Russell, Piotr Sniady · 2006 · arXiv

It is known that any quantum algorithm for Graph Isomorphism that works within the framework of the hidden subgroup problem (HSP) must perform highly entangled measurements across Ω(n \log n) coset states. One of the only known models for how such a measurement could be carried out efficiently is Kuperberg's algorithm for the HSP in the dihedral group, in which quantum states are adaptively combined and measured according to the decomposition of tensor products into irreducible representations. This ``quantum sieve'' starts with coset states, and works its way down towards representations whos

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On Ray Shooting for Triangles in 3-Space and Related Problems

Esther Ezra, Micha Sharir · 2021 · arXiv

We consider several problems that involve lines in three dimensions, and present improved algorithms for solving them. The problems include (i) ray shooting amid triangles in $R^3$, (ii) reporting intersections between query lines (segments, or rays) and input triangles, as well as approximately counting the number of such intersections, (iii) computing the intersection of two nonconvex polyhedra, (iv) detecting, counting, or reporting intersections in a set of lines in $R^3$, and (v) output-sensitive construction of an arrangement of triangles in three dimensions. Our approach is based on the

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Scaling Functions and Superscaling in Medium and Heavy Nuclei

A. N. Antonov, M. V. Ivanov, M. K. Gaidarov et al. · 2006 · arXiv

The scaling function $f(ψ')$ for medium and heavy nuclei with $Z\neq N$ for which the proton and neutron densities are not similar is constructed within the coherent density fluctuation model (CDFM) as a sum of the proton and neutron scaling functions. The latter are calculated in the cases of $^{62}$Ni, $^{82}$Kr, $^{118}$Sn, and $^{197}$Au nuclei on the basis of the corresponding proton and neutron density distributions which are obtained in deformed self-consistent mean-field Skyrme HF+BCS method. The results are in a reasonable agreement with the empirical data from the inclusive electron

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

CogniPlay: a work-in-progress Human-like model for General Game Playing

Aloïs Rautureau, Éric Piette · 2025 · arXiv

While AI systems have equaled or surpassed human performance in a wide variety of games such as Chess, Go, or Dota 2, describing these systems as truly "human-like" remains far-fetched. Despite their success, they fail to replicate the pattern-based, intuitive decision-making processes observed in human cognition. This paper presents an overview of findings from cognitive psychology and previous efforts to model human-like behavior in artificial agents, discusses their applicability to General Game Playing (GGP) and introduces our work-in-progress model based on these observations: CogniPlay.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Fully Dynamic Algorithms for Minimum Weight Cycle and Related Problems

Adam Karczmarz · 2021 · arXiv

We consider the directed minimum weight cycle problem in the fully dynamic setting. To the best of our knowledge, so far no fully dynamic algorithms have been designed specifically for the minimum weight cycle problem in general digraphs. One can achieve $\tilde{O}(n^2)$ amortized update time by simply invoking the fully dynamic APSP algorithm of Demetrescu and Italiano [J. ACM'04]. This bound, however, yields no improvement over the trivial recompute-from-scratch algorithm for sparse graphs. Our first contribution is a very simple deterministic $(1+ε)$-approximate algorithm supporting vertex

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Learning Robust State Abstractions for Hidden-Parameter Block MDPs

Amy Zhang, Shagun Sodhani, Khimya Khetarpal et al. · 2020 · arXiv

Many control tasks exhibit similar dynamics that can be modeled as having common latent structure. Hidden-Parameter Markov Decision Processes (HiP-MDPs) explicitly model this structure to improve sample efficiency in multi-task settings. However, this setting makes strong assumptions on the observability of the state that limit its application in real-world scenarios with rich observation spaces. In this work, we leverage ideas of common structure from the HiP-MDP setting, and extend it to enable robust state abstractions inspired by Block MDPs. We derive instantiations of this new framework f

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Designing quantum experiments with a genetic algorithm

Rosanna Nichols, Lana Mineh, Jesús Rubio et al. · 2018 · arXiv

We introduce a genetic algorithm that designs quantum optics experiments for engineering quantum states with specific properties. Our algorithm is powerful and flexible, and can easily be modified to find methods of engineering states for a range of applications. Here we focus on quantum metrology. First, we consider the noise-free case, and use the algorithm to find quantum states with a large quantum Fisher information (QFI). We find methods, which only involve experimental elements that are available with current or near-future technology, for engineering quantum states with up to a 100-fol

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

WiFi-based Global Localization in Large-Scale Environments Leveraging Structural Priors from osmAG

Xu Ma, Jiajie Zhang, Fujing Xie et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Global localization is essential for autonomous robotics, especially in indoor environments where the GPS signal is denied. We propose a novel WiFi-based localization framework that leverages ubiquitous wireless infrastructure and the OpenStreetMap Area Graph (osmAG) for large-scale indoor environments. Our approach integrates signal propagation modeling with osmAG's geometric and topological priors. In the offline phase, an iterative optimization algorithm localizes WiFi Access Points (APs) by modeling wall attenuation, achieving a mean localization error of 3.79 m (35.3\% improvement over tr

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Model-Agnostic AI Framework with Explicit Time Integration for Long-Term Fluid Dynamics Prediction

Sunwoong Yang, Ricardo Vinuesa, Namwoo Kang · 2024 · arXiv

This study addresses the critical challenge of error accumulation in spatio-temporal auto-regressive (AR) predictions within scientific machine learning models by exploring temporal integration schemes and adaptive multi-step rollout strategies. We introduce the first implementation of the two-step Adams-Bashforth method specifically tailored for data-driven AR prediction, leveraging historical derivative information to enhance numerical stability without additional computational overhead. To validate our approach, we systematically evaluate time integration schemes across canonical 2D PDEs be

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

PluriHopRAG: Exhaustive, Recall-Sensitive QA Through Corpus-Specific Document Structure Learning

Mykolas Sveistrys, Richard Kunert · 2025 · arXiv

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been used in question answering (QA) systems to improve performance when relevant information is in one (single-hop) or multiple (multi-hop) passages. However, many real life scenarios (e.g. dealing with financial, legal, medical reports) require checking all documents for relevant information without a clear stopping condition. We term these pluri-hop questions, and formalize them by 3 conditions - recall sensitivity, exhaustiveness, and exactness. To study this setting, we introduce PluriHopWIND, a multilingual diagnostic benchmark of 48 pluri-hop que

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Custom Memory Design for Logic-in-Memory: Drawbacks and Improvements over Conventional Memories

Fabrizio Ottati, Giovanna Turvani, Marco Vacca et al. · 2023 · arXiv

The speed of modern digital systems is severely limited by memory latency (the ``Memory Wall'' problem). Data exchange between Logic and Memory is also responsible for a large part of the system energy consumption. Logic--In--Memory (LiM) represents an attractive solution to this problem. By performing part of the computations directly inside the memory the system speed can be improved while reducing its energy consumption. LiM solutions that offer the major boost in performance are based on the modification of the memory cell. However, what is the cost of such modifications? How do these impa

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Addressing Climate Action Misperceptions with Generative AI

Miriam Remshard, Yara Kyrychenko, Sander van der Linden et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Mitigating climate change requires behaviour change. However, even climate-concerned individuals often hold misperceptions about which actions most reduce carbon emissions. We recruited 1201 climate-concerned individuals to examine whether discussing climate actions with a large language model (LLM) equipped with climate knowledge and prompted to provide personalised responses would foster more accurate perceptions of the impacts of climate actions and increase willingness to adopt feasible, high-impact behaviours. We compared this to having participants run a web search, have a conversation w

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Negative result measurements in mesoscopic systems

S. A. Gurvitz · 2003 · arXiv

We investigate measurement of electron transport in quantum dot systems by using single-electron transistor as a noninvasive detector. It is demonstrated that such a detector can operate in the ``negative-result measurement'' regime. In this case the measured current is not distorted, providing that it is a non-coherent one. For a coherent transport, however, the possibility of observing a particular state out of coherent superposition leads to distortion of a measured current even in the ``negative-result measurement'' regime. The corresponding decoherence rate is obtained in the framework of

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Learning to Identify Patients at Risk of Uncontrolled Hypertension Using Electronic Health Records Data

Ramin Mohammadi, Sarthak Jain, Stephen Agboola et al. · 2019 · arXiv

Hypertension is a major risk factor for stroke, cardiovascular disease, and end-stage renal disease, and its prevalence is expected to rise dramatically. Effective hypertension management is thus critical. A particular priority is decreasing the incidence of uncontrolled hypertension. Early identification of patients at risk for uncontrolled hypertension would allow targeted use of personalized, proactive treatments. We develop machine learning models (logistic regression and recurrent neural networks) to stratify patients with respect to the risk of exhibiting uncontrolled hypertension within

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Negative results for approximation using single layer and multilayer feedforward neural networks

J. M. Almira, P. E. Lopez-de-Teruel, D. J. Romero-Lopez et al. · 2018 · arXiv

We prove a negative result for the approximation of functions defined on compact subsets of $\mathbb{R}^d$ (where $d \geq 2$) using feedforward neural networks with one hidden layer and arbitrary continuous activation function. In a nutshell, this result claims the existence of target functions that are as difficult to approximate using these neural networks as one may want. We also demonstrate an analogous result (for general $d \in \mathbb{N}$) for neural networks with an \emph{arbitrary} number of hidden layers, for activation functions that are either rational functions or continuous splin

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Trust Over Fear: How Motivation Framing in System Prompts Affects AI Agent Debugging Depth

Wu Ji · 2026 · arXiv

System prompts for AI coding agents increasingly employ motivational framing -- from neutral task descriptions to fear-driven threats -- yet no controlled study has examined whether such framing affects agent behavior. We present two studies investigating how trust-based versus fear-based motivation framing in system prompts influences AI agent debugging performance. In Study 1, we conducted a controlled manual experiment comparing a trust-framed methodology (NoPUA) against an unframed baseline across 9 debugging scenarios using Claude Sonnet 4. Trust-framed agents found 59% more hidden issues

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Negative Result on Cross-Model Activation Transfer in a Pythia Multi-Hop Setting

Peiyan Zhang, Jason Xin · 2026 · arXiv

Recent work shows that language models can transmit behavioural traits through hidden signals in generated data during training. We ask whether a different activation-mediated channel is viable: can one language model communicate a useful intermediate reasoning state to another at inference time through a post-hoc linear activation bridge, rather than through a textual or structured-token relay? We test this question in a controlled Pythia-160M to Pythia-410M multi-hop reasoning setting. A linear translation layer learns a strong normalized-space map between sender and receiver hidden states,

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Distilling Self-Consistency into Verbal Confidence: A Pre-Registered Negative Result and Post-Hoc Rescue on Gemma 3 4B

Jon-Paul Cacioli · 2026 · arXiv

Small instruct-tuned LLMs produce degenerate verbal confidence under minimal elicitation: ceiling rates above 95%, near-chance Type-2 AUROC, and Invalid validity profiles. We test whether confidence-conditioned supervised fine-tuning (CSFT) with self-consistency-derived targets can close the gap between internal information and verbal readout. A pre-registered Phase 0 protocol on Gemma 3 4B-it with a modal filter restricting training to items with correct modal answers produced a negative result: AUROC2 dropped from 0.554 to 0.509 due to label-entropy collapse in the training targets. An explo

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Differentiable Energy-Based Regularization in GANs: A Simulator-Based Exploration of VQE-Inspired Auxiliary Losses

David Strnadel · 2025 · arXiv

This paper presents an exploratory, simulator-based proof of concept investigating whether differentiable energy terms derived from parameterized quantum circuits can serve as auxiliary regularization signals in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We augment the Auxiliary Classifier GAN (ACGAN) generator objective with a Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE)-inspired energy term computed from class-specific Ising Hamiltonians using Qiskit's EstimatorQNN and TorchConnector. All experiments are performed on a noiseless statevector simulator with only four qubits, using a deliberately simple

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

One-at-a-time: A Meta-Learning Recommender-System for Recommendation-Algorithm Selection on Micro Level

Andrew Collins, Dominika Tkaczyk, Joeran Beel · 2018 · arXiv

The effectiveness of recommendation algorithms is typically assessed with evaluation metrics such as root mean square error, F1, or click through rates, calculated over entire datasets. The best algorithm is typically chosen based on these overall metrics. However, there is no single-best algorithm for all users, items, and contexts. Choosing a single algorithm based on overall evaluation results is not optimal. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning-based approach to recommendation, which aims to select the best algorithm for each user-item pair. We evaluate our approach using the MovieLen

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Negative Results for Software Effort Estimation

Tim Menzies, Ye Yang, George Mathew et al. · 2016 · arXiv

Context:More than half the literature on software effort estimation (SEE) focuses on comparisons of new estimation methods. Surprisingly, there are no studies comparing state of the art latest methods with decades-old approaches. Objective:To check if new SEE methods generated better estimates than older methods. Method: Firstly, collect effort estimation methods ranging from "classical" COCOMO (parametric estimation over a pre-determined set of attributes) to "modern" (reasoning via analogy using spectral-based clustering plus instance and feature selection, and a recent "baseline method" pro

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Persuasive Dialogue Understanding: the Baselines and Negative Results

Hui Chen, Deepanway Ghosal, Navonil Majumder et al. · 2020 · arXiv

Persuasion aims at forming one's opinion and action via a series of persuasive messages containing persuader's strategies. Due to its potential application in persuasive dialogue systems, the task of persuasive strategy recognition has gained much attention lately. Previous methods on user intent recognition in dialogue systems adopt recurrent neural network (RNN) or convolutional neural network (CNN) to model context in conversational history, neglecting the tactic history and intra-speaker relation. In this paper, we demonstrate the limitations of a Transformer-based approach coupled with Co

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Honey, I shrunk the scientist -- Evaluating 2D, 3D, and VR interfaces for navigating samples under the microscope

Jan Tiemann, Matthew McGinity, Ulrik Günther · 2026 · arXiv

In contemporary biology and medicine, 3D microscopy is one of the most widely-used techniques for imaging and manipulation of various kinds of samples. Navigating such a micrometer-sized, 3-dimensional sample under the microscope -- e.g. to find relevant imaging regions -- can pose a tedious challenge for the experimenter. In this paper, we examine whether 2D desktop, 3D desktop, or Virtual Reality (VR) interfaces provide the best user experience and performance for the exploration of 3D samples. We invited 12 skilled microscope operators to perform two different exploration tasks in 2D, 3D an

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