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Browse the failure-mode index

753 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Computer Science. 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.

Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Significant improvement of lossy compression rate and speed of HPC data using perceptron parallelized compression

Xinzhe Chen, Jianjiang Li · 2023 · arXiv

The escalating surge in data generation presents formidable challenges to information technology, necessitating advancements in storage, retrieval, and utilization. With the proliferation of artificial intelligence and big data, the "Data Age 2025" report forecasts an exponential increase in global data production. The escalating data volumes raise concerns about efficient data processing. The paper addresses the predicament of achieving a lower compression ratio while maintaining or surpassing the compression performance of state-of-the-art techniques. This paper introduces a lossy compressio

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Null DatasetOpen accessComputer Science

Data Transmissions in Blockchain enabled AGVs

Junhan Liu, Shile Liu, Chenming Xu et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) operate in synergy to execute specific tasks. These vehicles exchange information to ensure seamless collaboration, prevent collisions, and eliminate task redundancy. The advent of blockchain technology offers a promising avenue for establishing a secure and dependable communication infrastructure for AGVs. Nonetheless, it becomes imperative for AGVs to adopt efficient data transmission methodologies, especially when interacting with the dynamic nature of blockchain infrastructure where data undergoes frequent modifications. In the present study, we introduce a

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Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

When Do LLM Agents Treat Surface Noise Differently from Semantic Noise? A 68-Cell Measurement Study with a Held-Out Trace-Level Validation

Liyun Zhang, Jiayi Guo · 2026 · arXiv

We document an empirical phenomenon in chain-of-thought and ReAct agents driven by ten large language models from seven architecture families: meaning-bearing perturbations (e.g., paraphrase, synonym) alter final answers more often than presentation perturbations (e.g., formatting, reordering) of comparable severity. Across 68 cells spanning GSM8K, MATH, and HotpotQA (1,530 originals and $\sim$11,150 variants), the inconsistency gap averages +19.69 pp after severity matching (paired $t=9.58$, $p<0.0001$), with 64/68 cells positive. The gap survives four severity-proxy audits and remains signif

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Probing non-perturbative QCD aspects on particle production in pp collisions with forward-backward correlations using \texttt{PYTHIA8}

Rohit Agarwala, Kalyan Dey · 2025 · arXiv

We employ PYTHIA8 simulations to study forward-backward (FB) correlations in pp collisions at LHC energies, probing non-perturbative QCD dynamics via color reconnection (CR) and QCD radiation (ISR/FSR). Using \texttt{PYTHIA8} (v8.311) under ALICE/ATLAS kinematics, we analyze: extensive: FB multiplicity ($b_{\rm corr}^{\rm mult}$) and summed $p_{\rm T}$ ($b_{\rm corr}^{\sum p_{\rm T}}$) correlations; intensive: FB mean $p_{\rm T}$ ($b_{\rm corr}^{\overline p_{\rm T}}$) correlations; and \textit{strongly intensive:} $Σ_{\rm N_F N_B}$ quantity in symmetric pseudorapidity intervals, validated agai

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Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

WebChallenger: A Reliable and Efficient Generalist Web Agent

Jayoo Hwang, Xiaowen Zhang, Vedant Padwal · 2026 · arXiv

Autonomous web navigation remains challenging for LLM agents, and the strongest generalist systems rely on proprietary reasoning models whose inference cost is prohibitive for the repetitive tasks where such agents would be most useful. We argue this gap stems not from insufficient model capability but from agent architectures that fail to replicate three human cognitive advantages: selective attention to relevant page regions, persistent memory of website structure, and procedural fluency with common interaction patterns. We introduce WebChallenger, a web agent framework that addresses each g

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

An Eye on Clinical BERT: Investigating Language Model Generalization for Diabetic Eye Disease Phenotyping

Keith Harrigian, Tina Tang, Anthony Gonzales et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Diabetic eye disease is a major cause of blindness worldwide. The ability to monitor relevant clinical trajectories and detect lapses in care is critical to managing the disease and preventing blindness. Alas, much of the information necessary to support these goals is found only in the free text of the electronic medical record. To fill this information gap, we introduce a system for extracting evidence from clinical text of 19 clinical concepts related to diabetic eye disease and inferring relevant attributes for each. In developing this ophthalmology phenotyping system, we are also afforded

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

When Youth Enter the Algorithmic Wild: Discovering and Understanding Potentially Harmful Teen Videos on Douyin and Kwai

Shaoxuan Zhou, Yafei Sun, Jing Zhang et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Short-video platforms like Douyin and Kwai have become central to adolescent digital life, but they also risk exposing teens to algorithmically amplified harmful content. Despite its societal importance, the scale, mechanisms, and real-world impact of this exposure remain poorly understood. Measuring it is challenging: recommendation feeds are personalized black boxes, harmful content employs sophisticated evasion tactics, and naive crawlers fail to replicate authentic teen behavior. To bridge this gap, we propose PHTV-Scout, the first large-scale, behaviorally grounded measurement framework f

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Toward Reliable Machine Unlearning: Theory, Algorithms, and Evaluation

Ali Ebrahimpour-Boroojeny · 2025 · arXiv

We propose new methodologies for both unlearning random set of samples and class unlearning and show that they outperform existing methods. The main driver of our unlearning methods is the similarity of predictions to a retrained model on both the forget and remain samples. We introduce Adversarial Machine UNlearning (AMUN), which surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods for image classification based on SOTA MIA scores. AMUN lowers the model's confidence on forget samples by fine-tuning on their corresponding adversarial examples. Through theoretical analysis, we identify factors governing AM

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

AnxietyFaceTrack: A Smartphone-Based Non-Intrusive Approach for Detecting Social Anxiety Using Facial Features

Nilesh Kumar Sahu, Snehil Gupta, Haroon R Lone · 2025 · arXiv

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a widespread mental health condition, yet its lack of objective markers hinders timely detection and intervention. While previous research has focused on behavioral and non-verbal markers of SAD in structured activities (e.g., speeches or interviews), these settings fail to replicate real-world, unstructured social interactions fully. Identifying non-verbal markers in naturalistic, unstaged environments is essential for developing ubiquitous and non-intrusive monitoring solutions. To address this gap, we present AnxietyFaceTrack, a study leveraging facial video

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Concurrent CNN-RNN Approach for Multi-Step Wind Power Forecasting

Syed Kazmi, Berk Gorgulu, Mucahit Cevik et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Wind power forecasting helps with the planning for the power systems by contributing to having a higher level of certainty in decision-making. Due to the randomness inherent to meteorological events (e.g., wind speeds), making highly accurate long-term predictions for wind power can be extremely difficult. One approach to remedy this challenge is to utilize weather information from multiple points across a geographical grid to obtain a holistic view of the wind patterns, along with temporal information from the previous power outputs of the wind farms. Our proposed CNN-RNN architecture combine

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards the Use of Neural Networks for Influenza Prediction at Multiple Spatial Resolutions

Emily L. Aiken, Andre T. Nguyen, Mauricio Santillana · 2019 · arXiv

We introduce the use of a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for influenza prediction at the state- and city-level in the US, and experiment with the inclusion of real-time flu-related Internet search data. We find that a GRU has lower prediction error than current state-of-the-art methods for data-driven influenza prediction at time horizons of over two weeks. In contrast with other machine learning approaches, the inclusion of real-time Internet search data does not improve GRU predictions.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Hyperparameters in Continual Learning: A Reality Check

Sungmin Cha, Kyunghyun Cho · 2024 · arXiv

Continual learning (CL) aims to train a model on a sequence of tasks (i.e., a CL scenario) while balancing the trade-off between plasticity (learning new tasks) and stability (retaining prior knowledge). The dominantly adopted conventional evaluation protocol for CL algorithms selects the best hyperparameters (e.g., learning rate, mini-batch size, regularization strengths, etc.) within a given scenario and then evaluates the algorithms using these hyperparameters in the same scenario. However, this protocol has significant shortcomings: it overestimates the CL capacity of algorithms and relies

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards reproducible machine learning-based process monitoring and quality prediction research for additive manufacturing

Jiarui Xie, Mutahar Safdar, Andrei Mircea et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Machine learning (ML)-based cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have been extensively developed to improve the print quality of additive manufacturing (AM). However, the reproducibility of these systems, as presented in published research, has not been thoroughly investigated due to a lack of formal evaluation methods. Reproducibility, a critical component of trustworthy artificial intelligence, is achieved when an independent team can replicate the findings or artifacts of a study using a different experimental setup and achieve comparable performance. In many publications, critical information nec

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Dissecting Role Cognition in Medical LLMs via Neuronal Ablation

Xun Liang, Huayi Lai, Hanyu Wang et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Large language models (LLMs) have gained significant traction in medical decision support systems, particularly in the context of medical question answering and role-playing simulations. A common practice, Prompt-Based Role Playing (PBRP), instructs models to adopt different clinical roles (e.g., medical students, residents, attending physicians) to simulate varied professional behaviors. However, the impact of such role prompts on model reasoning capabilities remains unclear. This study introduces the RP-Neuron-Activated Evaluation Framework(RPNA) to evaluate whether role prompts induce disti

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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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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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Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

How to Improve Top Tagging

Tilman Plehn, Michael Spannowsky, Michihisa Takeuchi · 2011 · arXiv

In time for the first tests on LHC data we introduce a set of improvements and tests of purely kinematic top tagging algorithms. First, we show how different jet algorithms can be used for different transverse momentum regimes. Combining pruning and filtering in the reconstruction can enhance the signal over background ratio significantly, while larger jet radii only give minor improvements. Finally, bottom tagging can be added to the top tagger, but at least for the HEPTopTagger does not improve the kinematic selection algorithm.

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Methods Dead-EndOpen accessComputer Science

LuMon: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Development Suite with Novel Datasets for Lunar Monocular Depth Estimation

Aytaç Sekmen, Fatih Emre Gunes, Furkan Horoz et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is crucial for autonomous lunar rover navigation using electro-optical cameras. However, deploying terrestrial MDE networks to the Moon brings a severe domain gap due to harsh shadows, textureless regolith, and zero atmospheric scattering. Existing evaluations rely on analogs that fail to replicate these conditions and lack actual metric ground truth. To address this, we present LuMon, a comprehensive benchmarking framework to evaluate MDE methods for lunar exploration. We introduce novel datasets featuring high-quality stereo ground truth depth from the real C

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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