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703 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

Age of Information Upon Decisions

Yunquan Dong, Zhengchuan Chen, Shanyun Liu et al. · 2018 · arXiv

We consider an M/M/1 update-and-decide system where Poisson distributed decisions are made based on the received updates. We propose to characterize the freshness of the received updates at decision epochs with Age upon Decisions (AuD). Under the first-come-first-served policy (FCFS), the closed form average AuD is derived. We show that the average AuD of the system is determined by the arrival rate and the service rate, and is independent of the decision rate. Thus, merely increasing the decision rate does not improve the timeliness of decisions. Nevertheless, increasing the arrival rate and

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Optimal covariant quantum networks

G. Chiribella, G. M. D'Ariano, P. Perinotti · 2008 · arXiv

A sequential network of quantum operations is efficiently described by its quantum comb, a non-negative operator with suitable normalization constraints. Here we analyze the case of networks enjoying symmetry with respect to the action of a given group of physical transformations, introducing the notion of covariant combs and testers, and proving the basic structure theorems for these objects. As an application, we discuss the optimal alignment of reference frames (without pre-established common references) with multiple rounds of quantum communication, showing that i) allowing an arbitrary am

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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

Analysing Lightweight Large Language Models for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition on Diverse Ouput Formats

Pierre Epron, Adrien Coulet, Mehwish Alam · 2026 · arXiv

Despite their strong linguistic capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are computationally demanding and require substantial resources for fine-tuning, which is unadapted to privacy and budget constraints of many healthcare settings. To address this, we present an experimental analysis focused on Biomedical Named Entity Recognition using lightweight LLMs, we evaluate the impact of different output formats on model performance. The results reveal that lightweight LLMs can achieve competitive performance compared to the larger models, highlighting their potential as lightweight yet effective

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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

Will Annotators Disagree? Identifying Subjectivity in Value-Laden Arguments

Amir Homayounirad, Enrico Liscio, Tong Wang et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Aggregating multiple annotations into a single ground truth label may hide valuable insights into annotator disagreement, particularly in tasks where subjectivity plays a crucial role. In this work, we explore methods for identifying subjectivity in recognizing the human values that motivate arguments. We evaluate two main approaches: inferring subjectivity through value prediction vs. directly identifying subjectivity. Our experiments show that direct subjectivity identification significantly improves the model performance of flagging subjective arguments. Furthermore, combining contrastive l

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

People readily follow personal advice from AI but it does not improve their well-being

Lennart Luettgau, Vanessa Cheung, Magda Dubois et al. · 2025 · arXiv

People increasingly seek personal advice from large language models (LLMs), yet whether humans follow their advice, and its consequences for their well-being, remains unknown. In a longitudinal randomised controlled trial with a representative UK sample (N = 6,474), we found that up to 79% of participants who had a 20-minute discussion with one of three AI chatbots (GPT-4o, LLama-3.3-70B, Gemini 3 Pro) about health, careers or relationships subsequently reported following its advice. Advice-following remained above 60% even for high-stakes recommendations, suggesting that users only weakly cal

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Optimal Use of Experience in First Person Shooter Environments

Matthew Aitchison · 2019 · arXiv

Although reinforcement learning has made great strides recently, a continuing limitation is that it requires an extremely high number of interactions with the environment. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of reusing experience from the experience replay buffer in the Deep Q-Learning algorithm. We test the effectiveness of applying learning update steps multiple times per environmental step in the VizDoom environment and show first, this requires a change in the learning rate, and second that it does not improve the performance of the agent. Furthermore, we show that updating less fr

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Mitigating Errors in DC Magnetometry via Zero-Noise Extrapolation

John S. Van Dyke, Zackary White, Gregory Quiroz · 2024 · arXiv

Zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE), a technique to estimate quantum circuit expectation values through noise scaling and extrapolation, is well-studied in the context of quantum computing. We examine the applicability of ZNE to the field of quantum sensing. Focusing on the problem of DC magnetometry using the Ramsey protocol, we show that the sensitivity (in the sense of the minimum detectable signal) does not improve upon using ZNE in the slope detection scheme. On the other hand, signals of sufficiently large magnitude can be estimated more accurately. Our results are robust across various noise

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Prediction of Platinum Prices Using Dynamically Weighted Mixture of Experts

Baruch Lubinsky, Bekir Genc, Tshilidzi Marwala · 2008 · arXiv

Neural networks are powerful tools for classification and regression in static environments. This paper describes a technique for creating an ensemble of neural networks that adapts dynamically to changing conditions. The model separates the input space into four regions and each network is given a weight in each region based on its performance on samples from that region. The ensemble adapts dynamically by constantly adjusting these weights based on the current performance of the networks. The data set used is a collection of financial indicators with the goal of predicting the future platinu

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A New Method for Employing Feedback to Improve Coding Performance

Aaron B. Wagner, Nirmal V. Shende, Yücel Altuğ · 2019 · arXiv

We introduce a novel mechanism, called timid/bold coding, by which feedback can be used to improve coding performance. For a certain class of DMCs, called compound-dispersion channels, we show that timid/bold coding allows for an improved second-order coding rate compared with coding without feedback. For DMCs that are not compound dispersion, we show that feedback does not improve the second-order coding rate. Thus we completely determine the class of DMCs for which feedback improves the second-order coding rate. An upper bound on the second-order coding rate is provided for compound-dispersi

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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

Does Editing Improve Answer Quality on Stack Overflow? A Data-Driven Investigation

Saikat Mondal, Chanchal K. Roy · 2025 · arXiv

High-quality answers in technical Q&A platforms like Stack Overflow (SO) are crucial as they directly influence software development practices. Poor-quality answers can introduce inefficiencies, bugs, and security vulnerabilities, and thus increase maintenance costs and technical debt in production software. To improve content quality, SO allows collaborative editing, where users revise answers to enhance clarity, correctness, and formatting. Several studies have examined rejected edits and identified the causes of rejection. However, prior research has not systematically assessed whether acce

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Three-dimensional physics and the pressure of hot QCD

A. Hietanen, K. Kajantie, M. Laine et al. · 2008 · arXiv

We update Monte Carlo simulations of the three-dimensional SU(3) + adjoint Higgs theory, by extrapolating carefully to the infinite volume and continuum limits, in order to estimate the contribution of the infrared modes to the pressure of hot QCD. The sum of infrared contributions beyond the known 4-loop order turns out to be a smooth function, of a reasonable magnitude and specific sign. Unfortunately, adding this function to the known 4-loop terms does not improve the match to four-dimensional lattice data, in spite of the fact that other quantities, such as correlation lengths, spatial str

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Does Multimodality Improve Recommender Systems as Expected? A Critical Analysis and Future Directions

Hongyu Zhou, Yinan Zhang, Aixin Sun et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Multimodal recommendation systems are increasingly popular for their potential to improve performance by integrating diverse data types. However, the actual benefits of this integration remain unclear, raising questions about when and how it truly enhances recommendations. In this paper, we propose a structured evaluation framework to systematically assess multimodal recommendations across four dimensions: Comparative Efficiency, Recommendation Tasks, Recommendation Stages, and Multimodal Data Integration. We benchmark a set of reproducible multimodal models against strong traditional baseline

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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

New Physics effect on $B_c \to J/ψτ\barν$ in relation to the $R_{D^{(*)}}$ anomaly

Ryoutaro Watanabe · 2017 · arXiv

We study possible new physics (NP) effects on $B_c \to J/ψτ\barν$, which has been recently measured at LHCb as the ratio of $R_{J/ψ} = \mathcal B(B_c \to J/ψτ\barν)/\mathcal B(B_c \to J/ψμ\barν)$. Combining it with the long-standing $R_{D^{(*)}}$ measurements, in which the discrepancy with the prediction of the standard model is present, we find possible solutions to the anomaly by several NP types. Then, we see that adding the $R_{J/ψ}$ measurement does not improve NP fit to data, but the NP scenarios still give better $χ^2$ than the SM. We also investigate indirect NP constraints from the li

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The Wisdom of Deliberating AI Crowds: Does Deliberation Improve LLM-Based Forecasting?

Paul Schneider, Amalie Schramm · 2025 · arXiv

Structured deliberation has been found to improve the performance of human forecasters. This study investigates whether a similar intervention, i.e. allowing LLMs to review each other's forecasts before updating, can improve accuracy in large language models (GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini Pro 2.5). Using 202 resolved binary questions from the Metaculus Q2 2025 AI Forecasting Tournament, accuracy was assessed across four scenarios: (1) diverse models with distributed information, (2) diverse models with shared information, (3) homogeneous models with distributed information, and (4) homogene

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Note on Over-Smoothing for Graph Neural Networks

Chen Cai, Yusu Wang · 2020 · arXiv

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved a lot of success on graph-structured data. However, it is observed that the performance of graph neural networks does not improve as the number of layers increases. This effect, known as over-smoothing, has been analyzed mostly in linear cases. In this paper, we build upon previous results \cite{oono2019graph} to further analyze the over-smoothing effect in the general graph neural network architecture. We show when the weight matrix satisfies the conditions determined by the spectrum of augmented normalized Laplacian, the Dirichlet energy of embeddin

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Indefinite causal order strategy does not improve the estimation of group action

Masahito Hayashi · 2025 · arXiv

We consider estimation of unknown unitary operation when the set of possible unitary operations is given by a projective unitary representation of a compact group. We show that neither indefinite causal order strategy nor adaptive strategy improves the performance of this estimation when error function satisfies group covariance. That is, the optimal parallel strategy gives the optimal performance even under indefinite causal order strategy and adaptive strategy. To study this problem, we newly introduce the concept of generalized positive operator valued measure (GPOVM), and its convariance c

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Learned Image Compression for Earth Observation: Implications for Downstream Segmentation Tasks

Christian Mollière, Iker Cumplido, Marco Zeulner et al. · 2025 · arXiv

The rapid growth of data from satellite-based Earth observation (EO) systems poses significant challenges in data transmission and storage. We evaluate the potential of task-specific learned compression algorithms in this context to reduce data volumes while retaining crucial information. In detail, we compare traditional compression (JPEG 2000) versus a learned compression approach (Discretized Mixed Gaussian Likelihood) on three EO segmentation tasks: Fire, cloud, and building detection. Learned compression notably outperforms JPEG 2000 for large-scale, multi-channel optical imagery in both

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

What does RL improve for Visual Reasoning? A Frankenstein-Style Analysis

Xirui Li, Ming Li, Tianyi Zhou · 2026 · arXiv

Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards has become a standard post-training stage for boosting visual reasoning in vision-language models, yet it remains unclear what capabilities RL actually improves compared with supervised fine-tuning as cold-start initialization (IN). End-to-end benchmark gains conflate multiple factors, making it difficult to attribute improvements to specific skills. To bridge the gap, we propose a Frankenstein-style analysis framework including: (i) functional localization via causal probing; (ii) update characterization via parameter comparison; and (iii) t

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

IUTEAM1 at MEDIQA-Chat 2023: Is simple fine tuning effective for multilayer summarization of clinical conversations?

Dhananjay Srivastava · 2023 · arXiv

Clinical conversation summarization has become an important application of Natural language Processing. In this work, we intend to analyze summarization model ensembling approaches, that can be utilized to improve the overall accuracy of the generated medical report called chart note. The work starts with a single summarization model creating the baseline. Then leads to an ensemble of summarization models trained on a separate section of the chart note. This leads to the final approach of passing the generated results to another summarization model in a multi-layer/stage fashion for better coh

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Topological based classification using graph convolutional networks

Roy Abel, Idan Benami, Yoram Louzoun · 2019 · arXiv

In colored graphs, node classes are often associated with either their neighbors class or with information not incorporated in the graph associated with each node. We here propose that node classes are also associated with topological features of the nodes. We use this association to improve Graph machine learning in general and specifically, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). First, we show that even in the absence of any external information on nodes, a good accuracy can be obtained on the prediction of the node class using either topological features, or using the neighbors class as an inp

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Loop as a Bridge: Can Looped Transformers Truly Link Representation Space and Natural Language Outputs?

Guanxu Chen, Dongrui Liu, Jing Shao · 2026 · arXiv

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit a gap between their internal knowledge and their explicit linguistic outputs. In this report, we empirically investigate whether Looped Transformers (LTs)--architectures that increase computational depth by iterating shared layers--can bridge this gap by utilizing their iterative nature as a form of introspection. Our experiments reveal that while increasing loop iterations narrows the gap, it is partly driven by a degradation of their internal knowledge carried by representations. Moreover, another empirical analysis suggests that current LTs' abilit

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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

Scale Alone Does not Improve Mechanistic Interpretability in Vision Models

Roland S. Zimmermann, Thomas Klein, Wieland Brendel · 2023 · arXiv

In light of the recent widespread adoption of AI systems, understanding the internal information processing of neural networks has become increasingly critical. Most recently, machine vision has seen remarkable progress by scaling neural networks to unprecedented levels in dataset and model size. We here ask whether this extraordinary increase in scale also positively impacts the field of mechanistic interpretability. In other words, has our understanding of the inner workings of scaled neural networks improved as well? We use a psychophysical paradigm to quantify one form of mechanistic inter

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Does Diversity Improve the Test Suite Generation for Mobile Applications?

Thomas Vogel, Chinh Tran, Lars Grunske · 2019 · arXiv

In search-based software engineering we often use popular heuristics with default configurations, which typically lead to suboptimal results, or we perform experiments to identify configurations on a trial-and-error basis, which may lead to better results for a specific problem. To obtain better results while avoiding trial-and-error experiments, a fitness landscape analysis is helpful in understanding the search problem, and making an informed decision about the heuristics. In this paper, we investigate the search problem of test suite generation for mobile applications (apps) using SAPIENZ w

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