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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

The nature of the gravitational vacuum

Samir D. Mathur · 2019 · arXiv

The vacuum must contain virtual fluctuations of black hole microstates for each mass $M$. We observe that the expected suppression for $M\gg m_p$ is counteracted by the large number $Exp[S_{bek}]$ of such states. From string theory we learn that these microstates are extended objects that are resistant to compression. We argue that recognizing this `virtual extended compression-resistant' component of the gravitational vacuum is crucial for understanding gravitational physics. Remarkably, such virtual excitations have no significant effect for observable systems like stars, but they resolve tw

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Analysis of Influence of Internet Retail Service Quality (IRSQ) to Consumer Online Shopping Satisfaction at www.kebanaran.com

Imam tahyudin · 2013 · arXiv

The purpose of this research was to determine the influence of Internet Retail Service Quality (IRSQ) (website performance, access, security, sensation, and information) to the satisfaction www.kebanaran.com online shoppers. The method of analysis used was path analysis. Based on the research results influence IRSQ variables (performance, access, sensation, and information security), performance variables (X1), access (X2) and sensation (X3) had no significant effect on satisfaction (Y). It showsthat the online shopping website www.kebanaran.com already apply standard terms online stores in ge

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Language Models Don't Learn the Physical Manifestation of Language

Bruce W. Lee, JaeHyuk Lim · 2024 · arXiv

We argue that language-only models don't learn the physical manifestation of language. We present an empirical investigation of visual-auditory properties of language through a series of tasks, termed H-Test. These tasks highlight a fundamental gap between human linguistic understanding and the sensory-deprived linguistic understanding of LLMs. In support of our hypothesis, 1. deliberate reasoning (Chain-of-Thought), 2. few-shot examples, or 3. stronger LLM from the same model family (LLaMA 2 13B -> LLaMA 2 70B) has no significant effect on H-Test performance. We bring in the philosophical cas

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Not All Queries Need Rewriting: When Prompt-Only LLM Refinement Helps and Hurts Dense Retrieval

Varun Kotte · 2026 · arXiv

Prompt-only, single-step LLM query rewriting, where a rewrite is generated from the query alone without retrieval feedback, is commonly used in production RAG pipelines, but its effect on dense retrieval is poorly understood. We present a systematic empirical study across three BEIR benchmarks, two dense retrievers, and multiple training configurations, and find strongly domain-dependent behavior: rewriting degrades nDCG@10 by 9.0 percent on FiQA, improves it by 5.1 percent on TREC-COVID, and has no significant effect on SciFact. We identify a consistent mechanism: degradations co-occur with r

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Search for the Decay $τ^{-}\to 4pi^{-}3π^{+}(π^{0})ν_τ$

CLEO Collaboration, K. Edwards et al · 1997 · arXiv

We have searched for the decay of the tau lepton into seven charged particles and zero or one pi0. The data used in the search were collected with the CLEO II detector at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 4.61 fb^(-1). No evidence for a signal is found. Assuming all the charged particles are pions, we set an upper limit on the branching fraction, B(tau- -> 4pi- 3pi+ (pi0) nu_tau) < 2.4 x 10^(-6) at the 90% confidence level. This limit represents a significant improvement over the previous limit.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

To SMOTE, or not to SMOTE?

Yotam Elor, Hadar Averbuch-Elor · 2022 · arXiv

Balancing the data before training a classifier is a popular technique to address the challenges of imbalanced binary classification in tabular data. Balancing is commonly achieved by duplication of minority samples or by generation of synthetic minority samples. While it is well known that balancing affects each classifier differently, most prior empirical studies did not include strong state-of-the-art (SOTA) classifiers as baselines. In this work, we are interested in understanding whether balancing is beneficial, particularly in the context of SOTA classifiers. Thus, we conduct extensive e

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

RegionGCN: Spatial-Heterogeneity-Aware Graph Convolutional Networks

Hao Guo, Han Wang, Di Zhu et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Modeling spatial heterogeneity in the data generation process is essential for understanding and predicting geographical phenomena. Despite their prevalence in geospatial tasks, neural network models usually assume spatial stationarity, which could limit their performance in the presence of spatial process heterogeneity. By allowing model parameters to vary over space, several approaches have been proposed to incorporate spatial heterogeneity into neural networks. However, current geographically weighting approaches are ineffective on graph neural networks, yielding no significant improvement

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Searching for dynamical fermion effects in UKQCD simulations

Chris Allton · 2001 · arXiv

We present recent results from the UKQCD collaboration's dynamical QCD simulations. This data has fixed lattice spacing but varying dynamical quark mass. We concentrate on searching for an unquenching signal in the mesonic mass spectrum where we do not find a significant effect at the quark masses considered.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Robot by Any Other Frame: Framing and Behaviour Influence Mind Perception in Virtual but not Real-World Environments

Sebastian Wallkotter, Rebecca Stower, Arvid Kappas et al. · 2020 · arXiv

Mind perception in robots has been an understudied construct in human-robot interaction (HRI) compared to similar concepts such as anthropomorphism and the intentional stance. In a series of three experiments, we identify two factors that could potentially influence mind perception and moral concern in robots: how the robot is introduced (framing), and how the robot acts (social behaviour). In the first two online experiments, we show that both framing and behaviour independently influence participants' mind perception. However, when we combined both variables in the following real-world exper

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Can Large Language Models (LLMs) Describe Pictures Like Children? A Comparative Corpus Study

Hanna Woloszyn, Benjamin Gagl · 2025 · arXiv

The role of large language models (LLMs) in education is increasing, yet little attention has been paid to whether LLM-generated text resembles child language. This study evaluates how LLMs replicate child-like language by comparing LLM-generated texts to a collection of German children's descriptions of picture stories. We generated two LLM-based corpora using the same picture stories and two prompt types: zero-shot and few-shot prompts specifying a general age from the children corpus. We conducted a comparative analysis across psycholinguistic text properties, including word frequency, lexi

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Augmenting Immersive Telepresence Experience with a Virtual Body

Nikunj Arora, Markku Suomalainen, Matti Pouke et al. · 2022 · arXiv

We propose augmenting immersive telepresence by adding a virtual body, representing the user's own arm motions, as realized through a head-mounted display and a 360-degree camera. Previous research has shown the effectiveness of having a virtual body in simulated environments; however, research on whether seeing one's own virtual arms increases presence or preference for the user in an immersive telepresence setup is limited. We conducted a study where a host introduced a research lab while participants wore a head-mounted display which allowed them to be telepresent at the host's physical loc

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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

Classical Simulation of Non-Classical Systems: A Large Deviation Analysis

Adam Brandenburger, Pierfrancesco La Mura · 2025 · arXiv

Any quasi-probability representation of a no-signaling system -- including quantum systems -- can be simulated via a purely classical scheme by allowing signed events and a cancellation procedure. This raises a fundamental question: What properties of the non-classical system does such a classical simulation fail to replicate? We answer by using large deviation theory to show that the probability of a large fluctuation under the classical simulation can be strictly greater than under the actual non-classical system. The key finding driving our result is that negativity in probability relaxes t

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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

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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

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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

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Somatic in the East, Psychological in the West?: Investigating Clinically-Grounded Cross-Cultural Depression Symptom Expression in LLMs

Shintaro Sakai, Jisun An, Migyeong Kang et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Prior clinical psychology research shows that Western individuals with depression tend to report psychological symptoms, while Eastern individuals report somatic ones. We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs), which are increasingly used in mental health, reproduce these cultural patterns by prompting them with Western or Eastern personas. Results show that LLMs largely fail to replicate the patterns when prompted in English, though prompting in major Eastern languages (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi) improves alignment in several configurations. Our analysis pinpoints two key reasons

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Interview-Informed Generative Agents for Product Discovery: A Validation Study

Zichao Wang, Alexa Siu · 2026 · arXiv

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on standardized social science instruments, but their value for product discovery remains unclear. We investigate whether interview-informed generative agents can simulate user responses in concept testing scenarios. Using in-depth workflow interviews with knowledge workers, we created personalized agents and compared their evaluations of novel AI concepts against the same participants' responses. Our results show that agents are distribution-calibrated but identity-imprecise: they fail to replicate the specific individual they are gro

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Neutral evolution and turnover over centuries of English word popularity

Damian Ruck, R. Alexander Bentley, Alberto Acerbi et al. · 2017 · arXiv

Here we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency and vocabulary at the population scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies from three centuries of English language books. Against these data, we test both static and dynamic predictions of two neutral models, including the relation between corpus size and vocabulary size, frequency distributions, and turnover within those frequency distributions. Although a commonly used Neutral model fails to replicate all these emergent properties at once, we find that modified two-stage Neutral model does replicate the static a

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Disturbance-Injected Robust Imitation Learning with Task Achievement

Hirotaka Tahara, Hikaru Sasaki, Hanbit Oh et al. · 2022 · arXiv

Robust imitation learning using disturbance injections overcomes issues of limited variation in demonstrations. However, these methods assume demonstrations are optimal, and that policy stabilization can be learned via simple augmentations. In real-world scenarios, demonstrations are often of diverse-quality, and disturbance injection instead learns sub-optimal policies that fail to replicate desired behavior. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel imitation learning framework that combines both policy robustification and optimal demonstration learning. Specifically, this combinato

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

PUB: An LLM-Enhanced Personality-Driven User Behaviour Simulator for Recommender System Evaluation

Chenglong Ma, Ziqi Xu, Yongli Ren et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Traditional offline evaluation methods for recommender systems struggle to capture the complexity of modern platforms due to sparse behavioural signals, noisy data, and limited modelling of user personality traits. While simulation frameworks can generate synthetic data to address these gaps, existing methods fail to replicate behavioural diversity, limiting their effectiveness. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Personality-driven User Behaviour Simulator (PUB), an LLM-based simulation framework that integrates the Big Five personality traits to model personalised user behaviour. PU

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Beyond Geometry: Artistic Disparity Synthesis for Immersive 2D-to-3D

Ping Chen, Zezhou Chen, Xingpeng Zhang et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Current 2D-to-3D conversion methods achieve geometric accuracy but are artistically deficient, failing to replicate the immersive and emotionally resonant experience of professional 3D cinema. This is because geometric reconstruction paradigms mistake deliberate artistic intent, such as strategic zero-plane shifts for pop-out effects and local depth sculpting, for data noise or ambiguity. This paper argues for a new paradigm: Artistic Disparity Synthesis, shifting the goal from physically accurate disparity estimation to artistically coherent disparity synthesis. We propose Art3D, a preliminar

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Beyond Temperature: Hyperfitting as a Late-Stage Geometric Expansion

Meimingwei Li, Yuanhao Ding, Esteban Garces Arias et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Recent work has identified a counterintuitive phenomenon termed "Hyperfitting", where fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) to near-zero training loss on small datasets surprisingly enhances open-ended generation quality and mitigates repetition in greedy decoding. While effective, the underlying mechanism remains poorly understood, with the extremely low-entropy output distributions suggesting a potential equivalence to simple temperature scaling. In this work, we demonstrate that this phenomenon is fundamentally distinct from distribution sharpening; entropy-matched control experiments re

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Nuclear Data Adjustment for Nonlinear Applications in the OECD/NEA WPNCS SG14 Benchmark -- A Bayesian Inverse UQ-based Approach for Data Assimilation

Christopher Brady, Xu Wu · 2025 · arXiv

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Working Party on Nuclear Criticality Safety (WPNCS) proposed a benchmark exercise to assess the performance of current nuclear data adjustment techniques applied to nonlinear applications and experiments with low correlation to applications. This work introduces Bayesian Inverse Uncertainty Quantification (IUQ) as a method for nuclear data adjustments in this benchmark, and compares IUQ to the more traditional methods of Generalized Linear Least Squares (GLLS) and Monte Carlo Bayes (MOCABA). Posterior predictions from IUQ showed

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The Devil is in Fine-tuning and Long-tailed Problems:A New Benchmark for Scene Text Detection

Tianjiao Cao, Jiahao Lyu, Weichao Zeng et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Scene text detection has seen the emergence of high-performing methods that excel on academic benchmarks. However, these detectors often fail to replicate such success in real-world scenarios. We uncover two key factors contributing to this discrepancy through extensive experiments. First, a \textit{Fine-tuning Gap}, where models leverage \textit{Dataset-Specific Optimization} (DSO) paradigm for one domain at the cost of reduced effectiveness in others, leads to inflated performances on academic benchmarks. Second, the suboptimal performance in practical settings is primarily attributed to the

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Personalized Data-Driven Generative Model of Human Repetitive Motion

Angelo Di Porzio, Marco Coraggio · 2025 · arXiv

The deployment of autonomous virtual avatars (in extended reality) and robots in human group activities -- such as rehabilitation therapy, sports, and manufacturing -- is expected to increase as these technologies become more pervasive. Designing cognitive architectures and control strategies to drive these agents requires realistic models of human motion. Furthermore, recent research has shown that each person exhibits a unique velocity signature, highlighting how individual motor behaviors are both rich in variability and internally consistent. However, existing models only provide simplifie

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Replicability Study of XTR

Rohan Jha, Reno Kriz, Benjamin Van Durme · 2026 · arXiv

The XTR (conteXtual Token Retrieval) algorithm is a modification to ColBERT retrieval that avoids the costly step of fully gathering and reranking the candidates' embeddings by imputing their missing similarity scores from the initial token retrieval step. The original work proposes a modified training objective as necessary for effective XTR retrieval, arguing that standard ColBERT token scoring is unsuitable for imputation. In this paper, we replicate both the XTR retrieval algorithm and its modified training objective, and extend the evaluation to knowledge-distillation (KD) training and ef

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Turning Waste into Wealth: Leveraging Low-Quality Samples for Enhancing Continuous Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Xin Ding, Yongwei Wang, Zuheng Xu · 2023 · arXiv

Continuous Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CcGANs) enable generative modeling conditional on continuous scalar variables (termed regression labels). However, they can produce subpar fake images due to limited training data. Although Negative Data Augmentation (NDA) effectively enhances unconditional and class-conditional GANs by introducing anomalies into real training images, guiding the GANs away from low-quality outputs, its impact on CcGANs is limited, as it fails to replicate negative samples that may occur during the CcGAN sampling. We present a novel NDA approach called Dua

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

RILe: Reinforced Imitation Learning

Mert Albaba, Sammy Christen, Thomas Langarek et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Acquiring complex behaviors is essential for artificially intelligent agents, yet learning these behaviors in high-dimensional settings poses a significant challenge due to the vast search space. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) requires extensive manual effort for reward function engineering. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) uncovers reward functions from expert demonstrations but relies on an iterative process that is often computationally expensive. Imitation learning (IL) provides a more efficient alternative by directly comparing an agent's actions to expert demonstrations; how

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Human Preferences in Large Language Model Latent Space: A Technical Analysis on the Reliability of Synthetic Data in Voting Outcome Prediction

Sarah Ball, Simeon Allmendinger, Frauke Kreuter et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly used in survey contexts to simulate human preferences. While many research endeavors evaluate the quality of synthetic GenAI data by comparing model-generated responses to gold-standard survey results, fundamental questions about the validity and reliability of using LLMs as substitutes for human respondents remain. Our study provides a technical analysis of how demographic attributes and prompt variations influence latent opinion mappings in large language models (LLMs) and evaluates their suitability for survey-based predictions. Using 14 different model

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