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21,290 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.

Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

A Note on Delta Hedging in Markets with Jumps

Aleksandar Mijatović, Mikhail Urusov · 2011 · arXiv

Modelling stock prices via jump processes is common in financial markets. In practice, to hedge a contingent claim one typically uses the so-called delta-hedging strategy. This strategy stems from the Black--Merton--Scholes model where it perfectly replicates contingent claims. From the theoretical viewpoint, there is no reason for this to hold in models with jumps. However in practice the delta-hedging strategy is widely used and its potential shortcoming in models with jumps is disregarded since such models are typically incomplete and hence most contingent claims are non-attainable. In this

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Negative / Null Result Report

Beliefs about the smoking effect on COVID-19 as significant factors in smoking cessation efforts

Mochamad Iqbal Nurmansyah, Yustiyani Yustiyani, Narila Mutia Nasir et al. · 2023 · International Journal of Public Health Science (IJPHS)

Owing to the various scientific evidence linking smoking to the increased risk of developing severe disease and death from the COVID-19 pandemic, now is a critical time for smokers to cut back or quit. This study aimed to analyze the…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Why adiabatic quantum annealing is unlikely to yield speed-up

Aarón Villanueva, Peyman Najafi, Hilbert J. Kappen · 2022 · arXiv

We study quantum annealing for combinatorial optimization with Hamiltonian $H = z H_f + H_0$ where $H_f$ is diagonal, $H_0=-|φ\rangle \langle φ|$ is the equal superposition state projector and $z$ the annealing parameter. We analytically compute the minimal spectral gap as $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{N})$ with $N$ the total number of states and its location $z_*$. We show that quantum speed-up requires an annealing schedule which demands a precise knowledge of $z_*$, which can be computed only if the density of states of the optimization problem is known. However, in general the density of states is

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Negative / Null Result Report

Effect of significant incidence of Braf p.V600E mutations in esophageal cancer on potential use of tyrosine kinase inhibitors.

Thurai Moorthy, Chrishanthi Rajasooriyar, Anusha Ginige et al. · 2020 · Journal of Clinical Oncology

e16591 Background: Routine diagnosis of esophageal cancer varies from locally advanced to metastatic at presentation. Most of these patients are cachectic at presentation and physically not suitable for radical tri-modality treatment as…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Causal Stability Selection

Falco J. Bargagli-Stoffi, Omar Melikechi · 2026 · arXiv

Identifying covariates that modify treatment effects is a central problem in causal inference. Yet existing data-adaptive procedures do not provide finite-sample control over the expected number of false discoveries, risking spurious findings that fail to replicate. We introduce causal stability selection, an algorithm that combines cross-fitted estimation of conditional average treatment effects with integrated path stability selection. The method accommodates arbitrary treatment effect estimators and arbitrary base selectors, and produces a selection set with an explicit, non-asymptotic boun

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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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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 Report

A SIGNIFICANT EFFECT OF INVOLVEMENT BEHAVIORS ON LONG-TERM TREATMENT OUTCOMES IN JAPANESE PATIENTS WITH OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER (OCD)

*Erisa Yokozumi, Keiichiro Mukai, Shun Ogino et al. · 2025 · International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology

Abstract Background Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) frequently exhibit involvement behaviors (IBs) in which they accommodate their caregivers to their OCD symptoms by 1) asking them for reassurance, 2) forcing them to…

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Negative / Null Result Report

P1812 The effect of pre-procedural significant mitral regurgitation upon mortality after transcatheter aortic valve implantation

S Soulaidopoulos, M Drakopoulou, G Oikonomou et al. · 2020 · European Heart Journal - Cardiovascular Imaging

Abstract Background The presence of concomitant mitral regurgitation (MR) is a common issue in patients with severe aortic stenosis and negatively affects patient outcome. Available data regarding MR reduction due to aortic gradient…

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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

The Saturation Point of Backtranslation in High Quality Low Resource English Gujarati Machine Translation

Arwa Arif · 2025 · arXiv

Backtranslation BT is widely used in low resource machine translation MT to generate additional synthetic training data using monolingual corpora. While this approach has shown strong improvements for many language pairs, its effectiveness in high quality, low resource settings remains unclear. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of backtranslation for English Gujarati translation using the multilingual pretrained MBART50 model. Our baseline system, trained on a high quality parallel corpus of approximately 50,000 sentence pairs, achieves a BLEU score of 43.8 on a validation set. We aug

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Short NoteOpen accessComputer Science

On the Measurement of Solar Neutrino Oscillation Parameters with KamLAND

Abhijit Bandyopadhyay, Sandhya Choubey, Srubabati Goswami et al. · 2003 · arXiv

A new reactor power plant Shika-2, with a power of approximately 4 GW and at a distance of about 88 km from the KamLAND detector is scheduled to start operating in March 2006. We study the impact of the $\barν_e$ flux from this reactor on the sensitivity of the KamLAND experiment to the solar neutrino oscillation parameters. We present results on prospective determination of $Δm^2_\odot$ and $\sin^2θ_\odot$ using the combined data from KamLAND and the solar neutrino experiments, including the effect of the Shika-2 contribution to the KamLAND signal and the latest data from the salt enriched ph

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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

Towards a fully self-consistent spectral function of the nucleon in nuclear matter

F. de Jong, H. Lenske · 1997 · arXiv

We present a calculation of nuclear matter which goes beyond the usual quasi-particle approximation in that it includes part of the off-shell dependence of the self-energy in the self-consistent solution of the single-particle spectrum. The spectral function is separated in contributions for energies above and below the chemical potential. For holes we approximate the spectral function for energies below the chemical potential by a $δ$-function at the quasi-particle peak and retain the standard form for energies above the chemical potential. For particles a similar procedure is followed. The a

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Assessing the Impact: Does an Improvement to a Revenue Management System Lead to an Improved Revenue?

Greta Laage, Emma Frejinger, Andrea Lodi et al. · 2021 · arXiv

Airlines and other industries have been making use of sophisticated Revenue Management Systems to maximize revenue for decades. While improving the different components of these systems has been the focus of numerous studies, estimating the impact of such improvements on the revenue has been overlooked in the literature despite its practical importance. Indeed, quantifying the benefit of a change in a system serves as support for investment decisions. This is a challenging problem as it corresponds to the difference between the generated value and the value that would have been generated keepi

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Systematic Analysis on the Temporal Generalization of Language Models in Social Media

Asahi Ushio, Jose Camacho-Collados · 2024 · arXiv

In machine learning, temporal shifts occur when there are differences between training and test splits in terms of time. For streaming data such as news or social media, models are commonly trained on a fixed corpus from a certain period of time, and they can become obsolete due to the dynamism and evolving nature of online content. This paper focuses on temporal shifts in social media and, in particular, Twitter. We propose a unified evaluation scheme to assess the performance of language models (LMs) under temporal shift on standard social media tasks. LMs are tested on five diverse social m

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Transforming Particular Stabilizer Codes into Hybrid Codes

Lane G. Gunderman · 2018 · arXiv

In this paper, we prove how to extend a subset of quantum stabilizer codes into a qudit hybrid code storing $\log_2 p$ classical bits over a qudit space with dimension $p$, with $p$ prime. Our proof also gives an explicit procedure for finding the entire collection of stabilizer algebras for all of the subcodes of the hybrid code. This allows extra classical information to be transmitted without having to arduously search for additional codes and their associated codewords, and also provides a first lower bound to the amount of classical information able to be transmitted in a qudit hybrid cod

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Learning the seasonality of disease incidences from empirical data

Karunia Putra Wijaya, Dipo Aldila · 2017 · arXiv

Investigating the seasonality of disease incidences is very important in disease surveillance in regions with periodical climatic patterns. In lieu of the paradigm about disease incidences varying seasonally in line with meteorology, this work seeks to determine how well standard epidemic models can capture such seasonality for better forecasts and optimal futuristic interventions. Once incidence data are assimilated by a periodic model, asymptotic analysis in relation to the long-term behavior of the disease occurrences can be performed using the classical Floquet theory, which explains the s

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Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessMathematics

Error Preserving Correction for CPD and Bounded-Norm CPD

Anh-Huy Phan, Petr Tichavský, Andrzej Cichocki · 2017 · arXiv

In CANDECOMP/PARAFAC tensor decomposition, degeneracy often occurs in some difficult scenarios, e.g., when the rank exceeds the tensor dimension, or when the loading components are highly collinear in several or all modes, or when CPD does not have an optimal solution. In such the cases, norms of some rank-1 terms become significantly large and cancel each other. This makes algorithms getting stuck in local minima while running a huge number of iterations does not improve the decomposition. In this paper, we propose an error preservation correction method to deal with such problem. Our aim is

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Free energy approximations in simple lattice proteins

Dirk Reith, Thomas Huber, Florian Mueller-Plathe et al. · 2000 · arXiv

This work addresses the question of whether it is possible to define simple pair-wise interaction terms to approximate free energies of proteins or polymers. Rather than ask how reliable a potential of mean force is, one can ask how reliable it could possibly be. In a two-dimensional, infinite lattice model system one can calculate exact free energies by exhaustive enumeration. A series of approximations were fitted to exact results to assess the feasibility and utility of pair-wise free energy terms. Approximating the true free energy with pair-wise interactions gives a poor fit with little t

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