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Browse the failure-mode index

21,733 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 ReportOpen accessMathematics

A step forwards on the Erdős-Sós problem concerning the Ramsey numbers $R(3,k)$

Rujie Zhu, Xiaodong Xu, Stanisław Radziszowski · 2015 · arXiv

Let $Δ_s=R(K_3,K_s)-R(K_3,K_{s-1})$, where $R(G,H)$ is the Ramsey number of graphs $G$ and $H$ defined as the smallest $n$ such that any edge coloring of $K_n$ with two colors contains $G$ in the first color or $H$ in the second color. In 1980, Erdős and Sós posed some questions about the growth of $Δ_s$. The best known concrete bounds on $Δ_s$ are $3 \le Δ_s \le s$, and they have not improved since the stating of the problem. In this paper we present some constructions, which imply in particular that $R(K_3,K_s) \ge R(K_3,K_{s-1}-e) + 4$. This does not improve the lower bound of 3 on $Δ_s$, b

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Entropy Bound for the Classical Capacity of a Quantum Channel Assisted by Classical Feedback

Dawei Ding, Yihui Quek, Peter W. Shor et al. · 2019 · arXiv

We prove that the classical capacity of an arbitrary quantum channel assisted by a free classical feedback channel is bounded from above by the maximum average output entropy of the quantum channel. As a consequence of this bound, we conclude that a classical feedback channel does not improve the classical capacity of a quantum erasure channel, and by taking into account energy constraints, we conclude the same for a pure-loss bosonic channel. The method for establishing the aforementioned entropy bound involves identifying an information measure having two key properties: 1) it does not incre

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Understanding the Effects of Miscalibrated AI Confidence on User Trust, Reliance, and Decision Efficacy

Jingshu Li, Yitian Yang, Renwen Zhang et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Providing well-calibrated AI confidence can help promote users' appropriate trust in and reliance on AI, which are essential for AI-assisted decision-making. However, calibrating AI confidence -- providing confidence score that accurately reflects the true likelihood of AI being correct -- is known to be challenging. To understand the effects of AI confidence miscalibration, we conducted our first experiment. The results indicate that miscalibrated AI confidence impairs users' appropriate reliance and reduces AI-assisted decision-making efficacy, and AI miscalibration is difficult for users to

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Reducing Over-smoothing in Graph Neural Networks Using Relational Embeddings

Yeskendir Koishekenov · 2023 · arXiv

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved a lot of success with graph-structured data. However, it is observed that the performance of GNNs does not improve (or even worsen) as the number of layers increases. This effect has known as over-smoothing, which means that the representations of the graph nodes of different classes would become indistinguishable when stacking multiple layers. In this work, we propose a new simple, and efficient method to alleviate the effect of the over-smoothing problem in GNNs by explicitly using relations between node embeddings. Experiments on real-world dataset

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Negative / Null Result Report

Recovery of Lost Premiums in Failed Mergers

Maziar Peihani · 2025 · Alberta Law Review

This article discusses lost premium provisions, often referred to as Con Ed provisions. The article examines the main variants of these provisions and considers how they may conflict with established doctrines in contract and corporate…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Exploring Multi-Modality Dynamics: Insights and Challenges in Multimodal Fusion for Biomedical Tasks

Laura Wenderoth · 2024 · arXiv

This paper investigates the MM dynamics approach proposed by Han et al. (2022) for multi-modal fusion in biomedical classification tasks. The MM dynamics algorithm integrates feature-level and modality-level informativeness to dynamically fuse modalities for improved classification performance. However, our analysis reveals several limitations and challenges in replicating and extending the results of MM dynamics. We found that feature informativeness improves performance and explainability, while modality informativeness does not provide significant advantages and can lead to performance degr

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Building Extractive Question Answering System to Support Human-AI Health Coaching Model for Sleep Domain

Iva Bojic, Qi Chwen Ong, Shafiq Joty et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are a leading cause of global deaths, necessitating a focus on primary prevention and lifestyle behavior change. Health coaching, coupled with Question Answering (QA) systems, has the potential to transform preventive healthcare. This paper presents a human-Artificial Intelligence (AI) health coaching model incorporating a domain-specific extractive QA system. A sleep-focused dataset, SleepQA, was manually assembled and used to fine-tune domain-specific BERT models. The QA system was evaluated using automatic and human methods. A data-centric framework enhanced

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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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Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Forest Mixing: investigating the impact of multiple search trees and a shared refinements pool on ontology learning

Marco Pop-Mihali, Adrian Groza · 2023 · arXiv

We aim at development white-box machine learning algorithms. We focus here on algorithms for learning axioms in description logic. We extend the Class Expression Learning for Ontology Engineering (CELOE) algorithm contained in the DL-Learner tool. The approach uses multiple search trees and a shared pool of refinements in order to split the search space in smaller subspaces. We introduce the conjunction operation of best class expressions from each tree, keeping the results which give the most information. The aim is to foster exploration from a diverse set of starting classes and to streamlin

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

A comparison of Vietnamese Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis Systems

Huy Kinh Phan, Viet Lam Phung, Tuan Anh Dinh et al. · 2020 · arXiv

In recent years, statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) systems have been widely utilized in many interactive speech-based systems (e.g.~Amazon's Alexa, Bose's headphones). To select a suitable SPSS system, both speech quality and performance efficiency (e.g.~decoding time) must be taken into account. In the paper, we compared four popular Vietnamese SPSS techniques using: 1) hidden Markov models (HMM), 2) deep neural networks (DNN), 3) generative adversarial networks (GAN), and 4) end-to-end (E2E) architectures, which consists of Tacontron~2 and WaveGlow vocoder in terms of speech qua

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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

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

Addressing Climate Action Misperceptions with Generative AI

Miriam Remshard, Yara Kyrychenko, Sander van der Linden et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Mitigating climate change requires behaviour change. However, even climate-concerned individuals often hold misperceptions about which actions most reduce carbon emissions. We recruited 1201 climate-concerned individuals to examine whether discussing climate actions with a large language model (LLM) equipped with climate knowledge and prompted to provide personalised responses would foster more accurate perceptions of the impacts of climate actions and increase willingness to adopt feasible, high-impact behaviours. We compared this to having participants run a web search, have a conversation w

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

3D deformable registration of longitudinal abdominopelvic CT images using unsupervised deep learning

Maureen van Eijnatten, Leonardo Rundo, K. Joost Batenburg et al. · 2020 · arXiv

This study investigates the use of the unsupervised deep learning framework VoxelMorph for deformable registration of longitudinal abdominopelvic CT images acquired in patients with bone metastases from breast cancer. The CT images were refined prior to registration by automatically removing the CT table and all other extra-corporeal components. To improve the learning capabilities of VoxelMorph when only a limited amount of training data is available, a novel incremental training strategy is proposed based on simulated deformations of consecutive CT images. In a 4-fold cross-validation scheme

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Feature interpretability in BCIs: exploring the role of network lateralization

Juliana Gonzalez-Astudillo, Fabrizio De Vico Fallani · 2024 · arXiv

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) enable users to interact with the external world using brain activity. Despite their potential in neuroscience and industry, BCI performance remains inconsistent in noninvasive applications, often prioritizing algorithms that achieve high classification accuracies while masking the neural mechanisms driving that performance. In this study, we investigated the interpretability of features derived from brain network lateralization, benchmarking against widely used techniques like power spectrum density (PSD), common spatial pattern (CSP), and Riemannian geometry.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Algorithmic Tradeoffs, Applied NLP, and the State-of-the-Art Fallacy

AJ Alvero, Ruohong Dong, Klint Kanopka et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Computational sociology is growing in popularity, yet the analytic tools employed differ widely in power, transparency, and interpretability. In computer science, methods gain popularity after surpassing benchmarks of predictive accuracy, becoming the "state of the art." Computer scientists favor novelty and innovation for different reasons, but prioritizing technical prestige over methodological fit could unintentionally limit the scope of sociological inquiry. To illustrate, we focus on computational text analysis and revisit a prior study of college admissions essays, comparing analyses wit

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Informer in Algorithmic Investment Strategies on High Frequency Bitcoin Data

Filip Stefaniuk, Robert Ślepaczuk · 2025 · arXiv

The article investigates the usage of Informer architecture for building automated trading strategies for high frequency Bitcoin data. Three strategies using Informer model with different loss functions: Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Generalized Mean Absolute Directional Loss (GMADL) and Quantile loss, are proposed and evaluated against the Buy and Hold benchmark and two benchmark strategies based on technical indicators. The evaluation is conducted using data of various frequencies: 5 minute, 15 minute, and 30 minute intervals, over the 6 different periods. Although the Informer-based model

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Active Learning of Molecular Data for Task-Specific Objectives

Kunal Ghosh, Milica Todorović, Aki Vehtari et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Active learning (AL) has shown promise for being a particularly data-efficient machine learning approach. Yet, its performance depends on the application and it is not clear when AL practitioners can expect computational savings. Here, we carry out a systematic AL performance assessment for three diverse molecular datasets and two common scientific tasks: compiling compact, informative datasets and targeted molecular searches. We implemented AL with Gaussian processes (GP) and used the many-body tensor as molecular representation. For the first task, we tested different data acquisition strate

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

When LLMs fall short in Deductive Coding: Model Comparison and Human AI Collaboration Workflow Design

Zijian Li, Luzhen Tang, Mengyu Xia et al. · 2025 · arXiv

With generative artificial intelligence driving the growth of dialogic data in education, automated coding is a promising direction for learning analytics to improve efficiency. This surge highlights the need to understand the nuances of student-AI interactions, especially those rare yet crucial. However, automated coding may struggle to capture these rare codes due to imbalanced data, while human coding remains time-consuming and labour-intensive. The current study examined the potential of large language models (LLMs) to approximate or replace humans in deductive, theory-driven coding, while

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Exploring Major Transitions in the Evolution of Biological Cognition With Artificial Neural Networks

Konstantinos Voudouris, Andrew Barron, Marta Halina et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Transitional accounts of evolution emphasise a few changes that shape what is evolvable, with dramatic consequences for derived lineages. More recently it has been proposed that cognition might also have evolved via a series of major transitions that manipulate the structure of biological neural networks, fundamentally changing the flow of information. We used idealised models of information flow, artificial neural networks (ANNs), to evaluate whether changes in information flow in a network can yield a transitional change in cognitive performance. We compared networks with feed-forward, recur

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Improve SAT-solving with Machine Learning

Haoze Wu · 2017 · arXiv

In this project, we aimed to improve the runtime of Minisat, a Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) solver that solves the Propositional Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) problem. We first used a logistic regression model to predict the satisfiability of propositional boolean formulae after fixing the values of a certain fraction of the variables in each formula. We then applied the logistic model and added a preprocessing period to Minisat to determine the preferable initial value (either true or false) of each boolean variable using a Monte-Carlo approach. Concretely, for each Monte-Carlo trial

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Cross-lingual robustness of LLM-brain alignment and its computational roots

Ni Yang, Rui He, Philipp Homan et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Large language models (LLMs) reliably predict neural activity during language comprehension and transformer depth has been interpreted as mirroring hierarchical cortical organization. However, it remains unclear whether such alignment extends to subcortical regions, overlaps spatially across languages, and what the computational roots of such alignment are. Here, we used a multilingual, whole-brain encoding framework to examine brain-LLM alignment across three typologically distinct languages: Mandarin, English, and French during naturalistic story listening. Our results show that across langu

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

On The Synergy Between Nonconvex Extensions of The Tensor Nuclear Norm for Tensor Recovery

Kaito Hosono, Shunsuke Ono, Takamichi Miyata · 2020 · arXiv

Low-rank tensor recovery has attracted much attention among various tensor recovery approaches. A tensor rank has several definitions, unlike the matrix rank--e.g. the CP rank and the Tucker rank. Many low-rank tensor recovery methods are focused on the Tucker rank. Since the Tucker rank is nonconvex and discontinuous, many relaxations of the Tucker rank have been proposed, e.g., the tensor nuclear norm, weighted tensor nuclear norm, and weighted tensor Schatten-$p$ norm. In particular, the weighted tensor Schatten-p norm has two parameters, the weight and $p$, and the tensor nuclear norm and

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Reducing Biases towards Minoritized Populations in Medical Curricular Content via Artificial Intelligence for Fairer Health Outcomes

Chiman Salavati, Shannon Song, Willmar Sosa Diaz et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Biased information (recently termed bisinformation) continues to be taught in medical curricula, often long after having been debunked. In this paper, we introduce BRICC, a firstin-class initiative that seeks to mitigate medical bisinformation using machine learning to systematically identify and flag text with potential biases, for subsequent review in an expert-in-the-loop fashion, thus greatly accelerating an otherwise labor-intensive process. A gold-standard BRICC dataset was developed throughout several years, and contains over 12K pages of instructional materials. Medical experts meticul

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them

Mirac Suzgun, Nathan Scales, Nathanael Schärli et al. · 2022 · arXiv

BIG-Bench (Srivastava et al., 2022) is a diverse evaluation suite that focuses on tasks believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. Language models have already made good progress on this benchmark, with the best model in the BIG-Bench paper outperforming average reported human-rater results on 65% of the BIG-Bench tasks via few-shot prompting. But on what tasks do language models fall short of average human-rater performance, and are those tasks actually unsolvable by current language models? In this work, we focus on a suite of 23 challenging BIG-Bench tasks which we c

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Take Caution in Using LLMs as Human Surrogates: Scylla Ex Machina

Yuan Gao, Dokyun Lee, Gordon Burtch et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Recent studies suggest large language models (LLMs) can exhibit human-like reasoning, aligning with human behavior in economic experiments, surveys, and political discourse. This has led many to propose that LLMs can be used as surrogates or simulations for humans in social science research. However, LLMs differ fundamentally from humans, relying on probabilistic patterns, absent the embodied experiences or survival objectives that shape human cognition. We assess the reasoning depth of LLMs using the 11-20 money request game. Nearly all advanced approaches fail to replicate human behavior dis

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Exploring the limits of Hierarchical World Models in Reinforcement Learning

Robin Schiewer, Anand Subramoney, Laurenz Wiskott · 2024 · arXiv

Hierarchical model-based reinforcement learning (HMBRL) aims to combine the benefits of better sample efficiency of model based reinforcement learning (MBRL) with the abstraction capability of hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) to solve complex tasks efficiently. While HMBRL has great potential, it still lacks wide adoption. In this work we describe a novel HMBRL framework and evaluate it thoroughly. To complement the multi-layered decision making idiom characteristic for HRL, we construct hierarchical world models that simulate environment dynamics at various levels of temporal abstrac

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

TSA-WF: Exploring the Effectiveness of Time Series Analysis for Website Fingerprinting

Michael Wrana, Uzma Maroof, Diogo Barradas · 2025 · arXiv

Website fingerprinting (WF) is a technique that allows an eavesdropper to determine the website a target user is accessing by inspecting the metadata associated with the packets she exchanges via some encrypted tunnel, e.g., Tor. Recent WF attacks built using machine learning (and deep learning) process and summarize trace metadata during their feature extraction phases. This methodology leads to predictions that lack information about the instant at which a given website is detected within a (potentially large) network trace comprised of multiple sequential website accesses -- a setting known

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Min-p, Max Exaggeration: A Critical Analysis of Min-p Sampling in Language Models

Rylan Schaeffer, Joshua Kazdan, Yegor Denisov-Blanch · 2025 · arXiv

Sampling from language models impacts the quality and diversity of outputs, affecting both research and real-world applications. Recently, Nguyen et al. 2024's "Turning Up the Heat: Min-p Sampling for Creative and Coherent LLM Outputs" introduced a new sampler called min-p, claiming it achieves superior quality and diversity over established samplers such as basic, top-k, and top-p sampling. The significance of these claims was underscored by the paper's recognition as the 18th highest-scoring submission to ICLR 2025 and selection for an Oral presentation. This paper conducts a comprehensive r

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Effect of Static vs. Conversational AI-Generated Messages on Colorectal Cancer Screening Intent: a Randomized Controlled Trial

Neil K. R. Sehgal, Manuel Tonneau, Andy Tan et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Large language model (LLM) chatbots show increasing promise in persuasive communication. Yet their real-world utility remains uncertain, particularly in clinical settings where sustained conversations are difficult to scale. In a pre-registered randomized controlled trial, we enrolled 915 U.S. adults (ages 45-75) who had never completed colorectal cancer (CRC) screening. Participants were randomized to: (1) no message control, (2) expert-written patient materials, (3) single AI-generated message, or (4) a motivational interviewing chatbot. All participants were required to remain in their assi

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