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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

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

Non-unitary neutrino mixing in the NO$ν$A near detector data

Ushak Rahaman, Soebur Razzaque · 2021 · arXiv

The $ν_μ\to ν_e$ oscillation probability over short baseline ($\lesssim 1$~km) would be negligible in case the mixing matrix for three active neutrinos is unitary. However, in case of non-unitary mixing of three neutrinos, this probability would be non-negligible due to the so-called "zero distance" effect. Hence, the near detector of the accelerator experiments such as NO$ν$A can provide strong constraints on the parameters of the non-unitary mixing with very large statistics. By analyzing the NO$ν$A near detector data we find that the non-unitary mixing does not improve fits to the $ν_e$ or

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Understanding Why Generalized Reweighting Does Not Improve Over ERM

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

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

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The Unlearnability Phenomenon in RLVR for Language Models

Yulin Chen, He He, Chen Zhao · 2026 · arXiv

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has proven effective in improving Large Language Model's (LLM) reasoning ability. However, the learning dynamics of RLVR remain underexplored. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: among hard examples that the model initially struggles with, a substantial subset remains unlearnable even when correct rollouts are present. To understand the phenomenon, we first demonstrate that existing optimization and sampling techniques fail to resolve unlearnability. With cross-example gradient analysis, we show that unlearnable examples

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Debate or Vote: Which Yields Better Decisions in Multi-Agent Large Language Models?

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Xiaojin Zhu, Sharon Li · 2025 · arXiv

Multi-Agent Debate~(MAD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the performance of large language models through collaborative reasoning. Despite recent advances, the key factors driving MAD's effectiveness remain unclear. In this work, we disentangle MAD into two key components--Majority Voting and inter-agent Debate--and assess their respective contributions. Through extensive experiments across seven NLP benchmarks, we find that Majority Voting alone accounts for most of the performance gains typically attributed to MAD. To explain this, we propose a theoretical framework that mo

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Compressing BERT: Studying the Effects of Weight Pruning on Transfer Learning

Mitchell A. Gordon, Kevin Duh, Nicholas Andrews · 2020 · arXiv

Pre-trained universal feature extractors, such as BERT for natural language processing and VGG for computer vision, have become effective methods for improving deep learning models without requiring more labeled data. While effective, feature extractors like BERT may be prohibitively large for some deployment scenarios. We explore weight pruning for BERT and ask: how does compression during pre-training affect transfer learning? We find that pruning affects transfer learning in three broad regimes. Low levels of pruning (30-40%) do not affect pre-training loss or transfer to downstream tasks a

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Does Weighting Improve Matrix Factorization for Recommender Systems?

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

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

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Upper Energy Limit of Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory in Neutral Pion Photoproduction

C. Fernandez-Ramirez, A. M. Bernstein · 2012 · arXiv

With the availability of the new neutral pion photoproduction from the proton data from the A2 and CB-TAPS Collaborations at Mainz it is mandatory to revisit Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory (HBChPT) and address the extraction of the partial waves as well as other issues such as the value of the low-energy constants, the energy range where the calculation provides a good agreement with the data and the impact of unitarity. We find that, within the current experimental status, HBChPT with the fitted LECs gives a good agreement with the existing neutral pion photoproduction data up to $\s

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

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

Paul K. Mandal · 2025 · arXiv

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

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Capturing Intransitive Dominance in Tennis Forecasting: A Graph Neural Network Approach

Lawrence Clegg, John Cartlidge · 2025 · arXiv

Intransitive player dominance, where player A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A, is common in competitive tennis. Yet, there are few known attempts to incorporate it within forecasting methods. We address this problem with a graph neural network approach that explicitly models these intransitive relationships through temporal directed graphs, with players as nodes and their historical match outcomes as directed edges. Our model (65.7% accuracy, 0.214 Brier score) forecasts competitively with established rating systems such as Weighted Elo. Although it does not improve on the baseline in uncond

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Does Interaction Improve Bayesian Reasoning with Visualization?

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

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

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On the Power of Perturbation under Sampling in Solving Extensive-Form Games

Wataru Masaka, Mitsuki Sakamoto, Kenshi Abe et al. · 2025 · arXiv

We investigate how perturbation does and does not improve the Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) algorithm in solving imperfect-information extensive-form games under sampling, where payoffs are estimated from sampled trajectories. While optimistic algorithms are effective under full feedback, they often become unstable in the presence of sampling noise. Payoff perturbation offers a promising alternative for stabilizing learning and achieving \textit{last-iterate convergence}. We present a unified framework for \textit{Perturbed FTRL} algorithms and study two variants: PFTRL-KL (standard KL

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Paying Attention to Descriptions Generated by Image Captioning Models

Hamed R. Tavakoli, Rakshith Shetty, Ali Borji et al. · 2017 · arXiv

To bridge the gap between humans and machines in image understanding and describing, we need further insight into how people describe a perceived scene. In this paper, we study the agreement between bottom-up saliency-based visual attention and object referrals in scene description constructs. We investigate the properties of human-written descriptions and machine-generated ones. We then propose a saliency-boosted image captioning model in order to investigate benefits from low-level cues in language models. We learn that (1) humans mention more salient objects earlier than less salient ones i

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Machine learning models for prediction of droplet collision outcomes

Arpit Agarwal · 2021 · arXiv

Predicting the outcome of liquid droplet collisions is an extensively studied phenomenon but the current physics based models for predicting the outcomes are poor (accuracy $\approx 43\%$). The key weakness of these models is their limited complexity. They only account for 3 features while there are many more relevant features that go unaccounted for. This limitation of traditional models can be easily overcome through machine learning modeling of the problem. In an ML setting this problem directly translates to a classification problem with 4 classes. Here we compile a large labelled dataset

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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

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

Batch normalization does not improve initialization

Joris Dannemann, Gero Junike · 2025 · arXiv

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

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Neural document expansion for ad-hoc information retrieval

Cheng Tang, Andrew Arnold · 2020 · arXiv

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

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

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

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

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

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Sparsity Analysis of a Sonomyographic Muscle-Computer Interface

Nima Akhlaghi, Ananya Dhawan, Amir A. Khan et al. · 2018 · arXiv

Objective: The objectives of this paper are to determine the optimal location for ultrasound transducer placement on the anterior forearm for imaging maximum muscle deformations during different hand motions and to investigate the effect of using a sparse set of ultrasound scanlines for motion classification for ultrasound-based muscle computer interfaces (MCIs). Methods: The optimal placement of the ultrasound transducer along the forearm is identified using freehand 3D reconstructions of the muscle thickness during rest and motion completion. From the ultrasound images acquired from the opti

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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

Excited Fermion Contribution to Z Physics at One Loop

M. C. Gonzalez-Garcia, S. F. Novaes · 1996 · arXiv

We investigate the effects induced by excited leptons at the one-loop level in the observables measured on the $Z$ peak at LEP. Using a general effective Lagrangian approach to describe the couplings of the excited leptons, we compute their contributions to both oblique parameters and $Z$ partial widths. Our results show that the new effects are comparable to the present experimental sensitivity, but they do not lead to a significant improvement on the available constraints on the couplings and masses of these states.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Effect of top quark spin on the unparticle couplings in γγ\to t\bar{t}

I. Sahin · 2008 · arXiv

We investigate the potential of $γγ$ collisions to probe scalar unparticle couplings via top-antitop quark pair production. We find 95% confidence level limits on the unparticle couplings with an integrated luminosity of $500 fb^{-1}$ and $\sqrt{s}=1$ TeV energy. We investigate the effect of top quark spin polarization on the unparticle couplings. It is shown that spin polarization of the top quark leads to a significant improvement in the sensitivity limits.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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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