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Browse the failure-mode index

21,707 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures. 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 ReportMedicine

When performance declines: culturally mediated delay in pediatric knee fracture following traditional healing and scarification-a case report from rural Cameroon.

Npochinto Moumeni, Dikongue · 2026 · Frontiers in pediatrics

Delayed presentation of pediatric musculoskeletal trauma remains a critical yet underexplored challenge in sub-Saharan Africa, where cultural beliefs, socioeconomic constraints, and reliance on traditional healing practices frequently…

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Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Effect of Vaginal Palpation on Voluntary Pelvic Floor Muscle Performance During Early Motor Learning in Women with Stress Urinary Incontinence (SUI): A Randomized Controlled Trial.

de Azevedo Ferreira, Fitz, Gimenez et al. · 2026 · International urogynecology journal

Seventy percent of women with pelvic floor muscle (PFM) dysfunction are unable to contract these muscles correctly. Instruction to contract properly is essential for effective PFM training (PFMT). The study aimed to compare two…

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Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Chronic Neutropenia in Children: A Single-Center Experience.

Roganović, Zubović, Đorđević et al. · 2026 · Acta medica academica

To analyze the characteristics, etiology, diagnostic evaluation, management, follow-up, and outcomes of children with chronic neutropenia treated at a tertiary care pediatric hospital in Croatia. We retrospectively reviewed the…

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Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

EXPRESS: Longitudinal evaluation of discordant symmetric dimethylarginine and creatinine as markers of glomerular filtration rate in radioiodine-treated hyperthyroid cats.

Hardy, Hibbert, Tasker et al. · 2026 · Journal of feline medicine and surgery

To determine the frequency and clinical significance of discordant serum symmetric dimethylarginine (SDMA) and creatinine concentrations relative to glomerular filtration rate (GFR) in mature and senior hyperthyroid cats treated with…

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Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

AMCP Market Insights: Managed care considerations in Barth syndrome.

Flavin, Vernon, Todd Cade et al. · 2026 · Journal of managed care & specialty pharmacy

Barth syndrome is an ultrarare, complex, multisystem, X-linked metabolic and neuromuscular disease, which poses significant and wide-ranging burden to patients and caregivers. Pharmacologic management focuses on treatment of disease…

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Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Long-term mortality trends and disparities in renal failure across the United States, 1999 to 2024: A nationwide population-based ecological time-trend study.

Wang, Leng · 2026 · The Journal of international medical research

ObjectiveAlthough renal failure is an important cause of death in the United States, recent mortality trends and subgroup differences remain insufficiently characterized. This nationwide ecological time-trend study examined renal failure…

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Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

The sound of engagement: assessing the feasibility and acceptability of an AI-generated personalized podcast as a between-session resource for therapy.

Peake, Swirbul, Rodio et al. · 2026 · Frontiers in digital health

Consistent client engagement with between-therapy session activities (i.e., homework) is a strong predictor of positive psychotherapy outcomes. Because traditional homework activities aren't always tailored to the individual, they can fail…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

John Ellipsoid and the Center of Mass of a Convex Body

Han Huang · 2016 · arXiv

It is natural to ask whether the center of mass of a convex body $K\subset \mathbb{R}^n$ lies in its John ellipsoid $B_K$, i.e., in the maximal volume ellipsoid contained in $K$. This question is relevant to the efficiency of many algorithms for convex bodies. In this paper, we obtain an unexpected negative result. There exists a convex body $K\subset \mathbb{R}^n$ such that its center of mass does not lie in the John ellipsoid $B_K$ inflated $(1-C\sqrt{\frac{\log(n)} {n}})n$ times about the center of $B_K$. Moreover, there exists a polytope $P \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ with $O(n^2)$ facets whose

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Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Evaluation of electroacupuncture acupoint selection's potential in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease: an investigation using a mouse gut microbiome and metabolomics model.

Lu, Bi, Gao et al. · 2026 · Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology

Electroacupuncture (EA) serves as an effective complementary therapy in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) within traditional Chinese medicine, with the therapeutic efficacy significantly influenced by the selection of…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Partial reconstruction of measures from halfspace depth

Petra Laketa, Stanislav Nagy · 2022 · arXiv

The halfspace depth of a $d$-dimensional point $x$ with respect to a finite (or probability) Borel measure $μ$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is defined as the infimum of the $μ$-masses of all closed halfspaces containing $x$. A natural question is whether the halfspace depth, as a function of $x \in \mathbb{R}^d$, determines the measure $μ$ completely. In general, it turns out that this is not the case, and it is possible for two different measures to have the same halfspace depth function everywhere in $\mathbb{R}^d$. In this paper we show that despite this negative result, one can still obtain a substan

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Look-ups are not (yet) all you need for deep learning inference

Calvin McCarter, Nicholas Dronen · 2022 · arXiv

Fast approximations to matrix multiplication have the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of neural network inference. Recent work on approximate matrix multiplication proposed to replace costly multiplications with table-lookups by fitting a fast hash function from training data. In this work, we propose improvements to this previous work, targeted to the deep learning inference setting, where one has access to both training data and fixed (already learned) model weight matrices. We further propose a fine-tuning procedure for accelerating entire neural networks while minimizing loss in

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Incentivizing High-Quality Content in Online Recommender Systems

Xinyan Hu, Meena Jagadeesan, Michael I. Jordan et al. · 2023 · arXiv

In content recommender systems such as TikTok and YouTube, the platform's recommendation algorithm shapes content producer incentives. Many platforms employ online learning, which generates intertemporal incentives, since content produced today affects recommendations of future content. We study the game between producers and analyze the content created at equilibrium. We show that standard online learning algorithms, such as Hedge and EXP3, unfortunately incentivize producers to create low-quality content, where producers' effort approaches zero in the long run for typical learning rate sched

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

$H$-Consistency Guarantees for Regression

Anqi Mao, Mehryar Mohri, Yutao Zhong · 2024 · arXiv

We present a detailed study of $H$-consistency bounds for regression. We first present new theorems that generalize the tools previously given to establish $H$-consistency bounds. This generalization proves essential for analyzing $H$-consistency bounds specific to regression. Next, we prove a series of novel $H$-consistency bounds for surrogate loss functions of the squared loss, under the assumption of a symmetric distribution and a bounded hypothesis set. This includes positive results for the Huber loss, all $\ell_p$ losses, $p \geq 1$, the squared $ε$-insensitive loss, as well as a negati

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Reoptimization of Parameterized Problems

Hans-Joachim Böckenhauer, Elisabet Burjons, Martin Raszyk et al. · 2018 · arXiv

Parameterized complexity allows us to analyze the time complexity of problems with respect to a natural parameter depending on the problem. Reoptimization looks for solutions or approximations for problem instances when given solutions to neighboring instances. We try to combine both techniques, in order to better classify the complexity of problems in the parameterized setting. Specifically, we see that some problems in the class of compositional problems, which do not have polynomial kernels under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions, do have polynomial kernels under reoptimization for

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Search for planets in hot Jupiter systems with multi-sector TESS photometry. II. Constraints on planetary companions in 12 systems

G. Maciejewski · 2022 · arXiv

Uninterrupted observations from space-borne telescopes provide the photometric precision that is required to detect shallow transits of small planets missed by ground-based surveys. We used data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to search for nearby planetary companions in 12 planetary systems with hot Jupiters: HD 2685, Qatar-10, WASP-4, WASP-48, WASP-58, WASP-91, WASP-120, WASP-121, WASP-122, WASP-140, XO-6, and XO-7. We also applied the transit timing method based on homogeneously determined mid-transit times in order to search for non-transiting companions that could gr

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Sparse Approximation is Provably Hard under Coherent Dictionaries

Ali Çivril · 2017 · arXiv

It is well known that sparse approximation problem is \textsf{NP}-hard under general dictionaries. Several algorithms have been devised and analyzed in the past decade under various assumptions on the \emph{coherence} $μ$ of the dictionary represented by an $M \times N$ matrix from which a subset of $k$ column vectors is selected. All these results assume $μ=O(k^{-1})$. This article is an attempt to bridge the big gap between the negative result of \textsf{NP}-hardness under general dictionaries and the positive results under this restrictive assumption. In particular, it suggests that the afo

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Abandoned HypothesisOpen accessComputer Science

Exchanging identical particles and topological quantum computing

S. J. van Enk · 2018 · arXiv

The phase factor $(-1)^{2s}$ that features in the exchange symmetry for identical spin-$s$ fermions or bosons is not simply and automatically equal to the phase factor one can observe in an interference experiment that involves physically exchanging two such particles. The observable phase contains, in general, single-particle geometric and dynamical phases as well, induced by both spin and spatial exchange transformations. By extending the analysis to (non-abelian) anyons it is argued that, similarly, there are single-anyon geometric and dynamical contributions in addition to purely topologic

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Oracle Complexity of Second-Order Methods for Finite-Sum Problems

Yossi Arjevani, Ohad Shamir · 2016 · arXiv

Finite-sum optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, and are commonly solved using first-order methods which rely on gradient computations. Recently, there has been growing interest in \emph{second-order} methods, which rely on both gradients and Hessians. In principle, second-order methods can require much fewer iterations than first-order methods, and hold the promise for more efficient algorithms. Although computing and manipulating Hessians is prohibitive for high-dimensional problems in general, the Hessians of individual functions in finite-sum problems can often be effic

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On the Complexity and Approximation of Binary Evidence in Lifted Inference

Guy Van den Broeck, Adnan Darwiche · 2013 · arXiv

Lifted inference algorithms exploit symmetries in probabilistic models to speed up inference. They show impressive performance when calculating unconditional probabilities in relational models, but often resort to non-lifted inference when computing conditional probabilities. The reason is that conditioning on evidence breaks many of the model's symmetries, which can preempt standard lifting techniques. Recent theoretical results show, for example, that conditioning on evidence which corresponds to binary relations is #P-hard, suggesting that no lifting is to be expected in the worst case. In

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

New metrics and search algorithms for weighted causal DAGs

Davin Choo, Kirankumar Shiragur · 2023 · arXiv

Recovering causal relationships from data is an important problem. Using observational data, one can typically only recover causal graphs up to a Markov equivalence class and additional assumptions or interventional data are needed for complete recovery. In this work, under some standard assumptions, we study causal graph discovery via adaptive interventions with node-dependent interventional costs. For this setting, we show that no algorithm can achieve an approximation guarantee that is asymptotically better than linear in the number of vertices with respect to the verification number; a wel

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Efficient Nearest-Neighbor Search for Dynamical Systems with Nonholonomic Constraints

Valerio Varricchio, Brian Paden, Dmitry Yershov et al. · 2017 · arXiv

Nearest-neighbor search dominates the asymptotic complexity of sampling-based motion planning algorithms and is often addressed with k-d tree data structures. While it is generally believed that the expected complexity of nearest-neighbor queries is $O(log(N))$ in the size of the tree, this paper reveals that when a classic k-d tree approach is used with sub-Riemannian metrics, the expected query complexity is in fact $Θ(N^p \log(N))$ for a number $p \in [0, 1)$ determined by the degree of nonholonomy of the system. These metrics arise naturally in nonholonomic mechanical systems, including cl

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