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19,871 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures · 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

Comparing Photorealistic and Animated Embodied Conversational Agents in Serious Games: An Empirical Study on User Experience

Danai Korre · 2023 · arXiv

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are paradigms of conversational user interfaces in the form of embodied characters. While ECAs offer various manipulable features, this paper focuses on a study conducted to explore two distinct levels of presentation realism. The two agent versions are photorealistic and animated. The study aims to provide insights and design suggestions for speech-enabled ECAs within serious game environments. A within-subjects, two-by-two factorial design was employed for this research with a cohort of 36 participants balanced for gender. The results showed that both th

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

On the concentration distribution in turbulent thermals

Ludovic Huguet, Victor Lherm, Renaud Deguen et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Turbulent thermals emerge in a wide variety of geophysical and industrial flows, such as atmospheric cumulus convection and pollutant dispersal in oceans and lakes. When a buoyant fluid mass rises, or sinks, heat and mass transfers occur by the engulfment of the fresh surrounding fluid inside the thermal - a process that spans over multiple scales from macroscopic entrainment of ambient fluid to microscopic diffusive processes. Turbulent thermals are typically investigated through their integral properties (radius, depth, entrainment rate). However, mixing processes depend on the internal dist

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Epitaxial (111) Films of Cu, Ni, and Cu$_xNi$_y$ on α-Al$_2$O$_3$(0001) for Graphene Growth by Chemical Vapor Deposition

David L. Miller, Mark W. Keller, Justin M. Shaw et al. · 2012 · arXiv

Films of (111)-textured Cu, Ni, and Cu$_x$Ni$_y$ were evaluated as substrates for chemical vapor deposition of graphene. A metal thickness of 400 nm to 700 nm was sputtered onto a substrate of $α-$Al$_2$O$_3$(0001) at temperatures of 250 C to 650 C. The films were then annealed at 1000 C in a tube furnace. X-ray and electron backscatter diffraction measurements showed all films have (111) texture but have grains with in-plane orientations differing by $60^{\circ}$. The in-plane epitaxial relationship for all films was $[110]_{metal}$||$[10\bar{1}0]_{{Al}_{2}{O}_{3}}$. Reactive sputtering of Al

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

BSQ Conserved Charges in Relativistic Viscous Hydrodynamics solved with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Christopher Plumberg, Dekrayat Almaalol, Travis Dore et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Conservation laws play a crucial role in the modeling of heavy-ion collisions, including the those for charges such as baryon number (B), strangeness (S), and electric charge (Q). In this study, we present a new 2+1 relativistic viscous hydrodynamic code called CCAKE which uses the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) formalism to locally conserve BSQ charges, together with an extended description of the multi-dimensional equation of state (EoS) obtained from lattice Quantum Chromodynamics. Initial conditions for CCAKE are supplied by the ICCING model, which samples gluon splittings into quar

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

An Empirical Security Evaluation of LLM-Generated Cryptographic Rust Code

Mohamed Elsayed, Kenneth Fulton, Jeong Yang · 2026 · arXiv

Developers and organizations are using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate security-critical code more frequently than ever, including cryptographic solutions for their products. This study presents an empirical evaluation of cryptographic security in 240 Rust code samples for two crypto algorithms (AES-256-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305) generated by three LLMs (Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-4o, and DeepSeek Coder) using four different prompt strategies. For each successfully compiled code sample, CodeQL static analysis and our rule-based crypto-specific analyzer were used to detect vulnerabilities, wh

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

ConvMemory: A Lightweight Learned Memory Reranker, a Negative Attribution Result, and a Research-Preview Conflict Editor

Taiheng Pan · 2026 · arXiv

We describe ConvMemory, a small 3.6M-parameter learned reranker for conversational long-term memory retrieval, trained with cross-encoder teacher supervision over fused dense and lexical features. On the LongMemEval memory family, ConvMemory operates above the BGE-large cross-encoder in Recall@10 at 12-47x lower latency, remains within 0.025 Recall@10 of mxbai-rerank-large-v1 on Clean500 while running 28x cheaper; under Stress1000 distractors the Recall@10 gap widens to 0.081 but ConvMemory still operates at 117x lower latency; these LongMemEval numbers are single-run or single-seed and are re

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Interplay among superconductivity, pseudogap, and stripe correlations in different high-Tc cuprates

S. H. Naqib, R. S. Islam · 2011 · arXiv

The effect of Zn substitution in the CuO2 plane on the superconducting transition temperature, Tc, was studied for the La2-xSrxCu1-yZnyO4 and YBa2(Cu1-yZny)3O7-d compounds over a wide range of hole concentration, p, and Zn content (y). Zn induced rate of suppression of Tc, dTc(p)/dy, was found to be strongly p-dependent and showed a monotonic variation with p, except in the vicinity of p ~ 0.125, i.e., near the so-called 1/8th anomaly where the charge/spin stripe correlations are at their strongest in hole doped cuprates. The magnitude of dTc(p)/dy decreased significantly around this hole conc

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Reactive solute transport in physically and chemically heterogeneous porous media with multimodal reactive mineral facies: The Lagrangian approach

Mohamad Reza Soltanian, Robert Ritzi, Zhenxue Dai et al. · 2014 · arXiv

Physical and chemical heterogeneities have a large impact on reactive transport in porous media. Examples of heterogeneous attributes affecting reactive mass transport are the hydraulic conductivity (K), and the equilibrium sorption distribution coefficient (Kd). This paper uses the Deng et al. (2013) conceptual model for multimodal reactive mineral facies and a Lagrangian-based stochastic theory in order to analyze the reactive solute dispersion in three-dimensional anisotropic heterogeneous porous media with hierarchical organization of reactive minerals. An example based on real field data

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Cooperation and Contagion in Web-Based, Networked Public Goods Experiments

Siddharth Suri, Duncan J. Watts · 2010 · arXiv

A longstanding idea in the literature on human cooperation is that cooperation should be reinforced when conditional cooperators are more likely to interact. In the context of social networks, this idea implies that cooperation should fare better in highly clustered networks such as cliques than in networks with low clustering such as random networks. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a series of web-based experiments, in which 24 individuals played a local public goods game arranged on one of five network topologies that varied between disconnected cliques and a random regular graph. In c

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards the Design of Effective Freehand Gestural Interaction for Interactive TV

Gang Ren, Wenbin Li, Eamonn O'Neill · 2016 · arXiv

As interactive devices become pervasive, people are beginning to looking for more advanced interaction with televisions in the living room. Interactive television has the potential to offer a very engaging experience. But most common user tasks are still challenging with such systems, such as menu selection or text input. And little work has been done on understanding and sup-porting the effective design of freehand interaction with an TV in the living room. In this paper, we perform two studies investi-gating freehand gestural interaction with a consumer level sensor, which is suitable for TV

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

The separate and combined effects of baryon physics and neutrino free-streaming on large-scale structure

Benjamin O. Mummery, Ian G. McCarthy, Simeon Bird et al. · 2017 · arXiv

We use the cosmo-OWLS and BAHAMAS suites of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to explore the separate and combined effects of baryon physics (particularly feedback from active galactic nuclei, AGN) and free-streaming of massive neutrinos on large-scale structure. We focus on five diagnostics: i) the halo mass function; ii) halo mass density profiles; iii) the halo mass-concentration relation; iv) the clustering of haloes; and v) the clustering of matter; and we explore the extent to which the effects of baryon physics and neutrino free-streaming can be treated independently. Consistent w

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Glass phases of flux lattices in layered superconductors

Anatoly Golub, Baruch Horovitz · 1997 · arXiv

We study a flux lattice which is parallel to superconducting layers, allowing for dislocations and for disorder of both short wavelength and long wavelength. We find that the long wavelength disorder has a significant effect on the phase diagram -- it produces a first order transition within the Bragg glass phase and leads to melting at strong disorder. This then allows a Friedel scenario of 2D superconductivity.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Galaxy Flybys: Evolution of the Bulge, Disk, and Spiral Arms

Ankit Kumar, Mousumi Das, Sandeep Kumar Kataria · 2021 · arXiv

Galaxy flybys are as common as mergers in low redshift universe and are important for galaxy evolution as they involve the exchange of significant amounts of mass and energy. In this study we investigate the effect of minor flybys on the bulges, disks, and spiral arms of Milky Way mass galaxies for two types of bulges - classical bulges and boxy/peanut pseudobulges. Our N-body simulations comprise of two disk galaxies of mass ratios 10:1 and 5:1, where the disks of the galaxies lie in their orbital plane and the pericenter distance is varied. We performed photometric and kinematic bulge-disk d

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Impact of geolocation data on augmented reality usability: A comparative user test

Julien Mercier, N. Chabloz, G. Dozot et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Abstract. While the use of location-based augmented reality (AR) for education has demonstrated benefits on participants' motivation, engagement, and on their physical activity, geolocation data inaccuracy causes augmented objects to jitter or drift, which is a factor in downgrading user experience. We developed a free and open source web AR application and conducted a comparative user test (n = 54) in order to assess the impact of geolocation data on usability, exploration, and focus. A control group explored biodiversity in nature using the system in combination with embedded GNSS data, and

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Evolution of Thermally Pulsing Asymptotic Giant Branch Stars IV. Constraining Mass-Loss & Lifetimes of Low Mass, Low Metallicity AGB Stars

Philip Rosenfield, Paola Marigo, Leo Girardi et al. · 2014 · arXiv

The evolution and lifetimes of thermally pulsating asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) stars suffer from significant uncertainties. In this work, we analyze the numbers and luminosity functions of TP-AGB stars in six quiescent, low metallicity ([Fe/H] $\lesssim -0.86$) galaxies taken from the ANGST sample, using HST photometry in both optical and near-infrared filters. The galaxies contain over 1000 TP-AGB stars (at least 60 per field). We compare the observed TP-AGB luminosity functions and relative numbers of TP-AGB and RGB stars, to models generated from different suites of TP-AGB evolutionary

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The effect of supersymmetric CP phases on Chargino-Pair Production via Drell-Yan Process at the LHC

Kerem Cankocak, Aytekin Aydemir, Ramazan Sever · 2004 · arXiv

We compute the rates for pp annihilation into chargino-pairs via Drell-Yan process taking into account the effects of supersymmetric soft phases, at proton-proton collider. In particular, the phase of the mu parameter gains direct accessibility via the production of dissimilar charginos. The phases of the trilinear soft masses do not have a significant effect on the cross sections.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

More Rounds, More Noise: Why Multi-Turn Review Fails to Improve Cross-Context Verification

Song Tae-Eun · 2026 · arXiv

Cross-Context Review (CCR) improves LLM verification by separating production and review into independent sessions. A natural extension is multi-turn review: letting the reviewer ask follow-up questions, receive author responses, and review again. We call this Dynamic Cross-Context Review (D-CCR). In a controlled experiment with 30 artifacts and 150 injected errors, we tested four D-CCR variants against the single-pass CCR baseline. Single-pass CCR (F1 = 0.376) significantly outperformed all multi-turn variants, including D-CCR-2b with question-and-answer exchange (F1 = 0.303, $p < 0.001$, $d

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations

Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn, David Kinney, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Generative large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated gaps in diverse cultural awareness across the globe. We investigate the effect of retrieval augmented generation and search-grounding techniques on LLMs' ability to display familiarity with various national cultures. Specifically, we compare the performance of standard LLMs, LLMs augmented with retrievals from a bespoke knowledge base (i.e., KB grounding), and LLMs augmented with retrievals from a web search (i.e., search grounding) on multiple cultural awareness benchmarks. We find that search grounding significantly improves the LLM p

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Assessing and Comparing Fixed-Target Forecasts of Arctic Sea Ice: Glide Charts for Feature-Engineered Linear Regression and Machine Learning Models

Francis X. Diebold, Maximilian Goebel, Philippe Goulet Coulombe · 2022 · arXiv

We use "glide charts" (plots of sequences of root mean squared forecast errors as the target date is approached) to evaluate and compare fixed-target forecasts of Arctic sea ice. We first use them to evaluate the simple feature-engineered linear regression (FELR) forecasts of Diebold and Goebel (2021), and to compare FELR forecasts to naive pure-trend benchmark forecasts. Then we introduce a much more sophisticated feature-engineered machine learning (FEML) model, and we use glide charts to evaluate FEML forecasts and compare them to a FELR benchmark. Our substantive results include the freque

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Adaptation Odyssey in LLMs: Why Does Additional Pretraining Sometimes Fail to Improve?

Fırat Öncel, Matthias Bethge, Beyza Ermis et al. · 2024 · arXiv

In the last decade, the generalization and adaptation abilities of deep learning models were typically evaluated on fixed training and test distributions. Contrary to traditional deep learning, large language models (LLMs) are (i) even more overparameterized, (ii) trained on unlabeled text corpora curated from the Internet with minimal human intervention, and (iii) trained in an online fashion. These stark contrasts prevent researchers from transferring lessons learned on model generalization and adaptation in deep learning contexts to LLMs. To this end, our short paper introduces empirical ob

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Self-Consistency Falls Short! The Adverse Effects of Positional Bias on Long-Context Problems

Adam Byerly, Daniel Khashabi · 2024 · arXiv

Self-consistency (SC) improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) across various tasks and domains that involve short content. However, does this support its effectiveness for long-context problems? We challenge the assumption that SC's benefits generalize to long-context settings, where LLMs often struggle with position bias, the systematic over-reliance on specific context regions-which hinders their ability to utilize information effectively from all parts of their context. Through comprehensive experimentation with varying state-of-the-art models, tasks, and SC formulations, w

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Depth Adaptive Efficient Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Chunliang Li, Tianze Cao, Sanyuan Zhao · 2026 · arXiv

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) modeling inefficiently applies a fixed computational depth to each position when generating high-resolution images. While existing methods accelerate inference by pruning tokens using frequency maps, their binary hard-pruning approach is fundamentally limited and fails to improve quality even with better frequency estimation. Observing that VAR models possess significant depth redundancy, we propose a paradigm shift from pruning entire tokens to adaptively allocating per-token computational depth. To this end, we introduce DepthVAR, a training-free framework that dy

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Degradation of Feature Space in Continual Learning

Chiara Lanza, Roberto Pereira, Marco Miozzo et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Centralized training is the standard paradigm in deep learning, enabling models to learn from a unified dataset in a single location. In such setup, isotropic feature distributions naturally arise as a mean to support well-structured and generalizable representations. In contrast, continual learning operates on streaming and non-stationary data, and trains models incrementally, inherently facing the well-known plasticity-stability dilemma. In such settings, learning dynamics tends to yield increasingly anisotropic feature space. This arises a fundamental question: should isotropy be enforced t

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Revealing the Challenges of Attention-FFN Disaggregation for Modern MoE Models and Hardware Systems

Guowei Liu, Hongming Li, Yaning Guo et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Deploying large-scale MoE models presents challenges in memory capacity and bandwidth for expert activation. While Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD) has emerged as a potential architecture to decouple compute and memory resources, its performance boundaries compared to standard large-scale Expert Parallelism (EP) remain underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of AFD by extending the roofline model to the communication level, correlating interconnect bandwidth, arithmetic intensity, and Hardware FLOPS Utilization (HFU). Our analysis reveals a dead zone on standard cluste

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Exploring System 1 and 2 communication for latent reasoning in LLMs

Julian Coda-Forno, Zhuokai Zhao, Qiang Zhang et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Should LLM reasoning live in a separate module, or within a single model's forward pass and representational space? We study dual-architecture latent reasoning, where a fluent Base exchanges latent messages with a Coprocessor, and test two hypotheses aimed at improving latent communication over Liu et al. (2024): (H1) increase channel capacity; (H2) learn communication via joint finetuning. Under matched latent-token budgets on GPT-2 and Qwen-3, H2 is consistently strongest while H1 yields modest gains. A unified soft-embedding baseline, a single model with the same forward pass and shared rep

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

BiasBuster: a Neural Approach for Accurate Estimation of Population Statistics using Biased Location Data

Sepanta Zeighami, Cyrus Shahabi · 2024 · arXiv

While extremely useful (e.g., for COVID-19 forecasting and policy-making, urban mobility analysis and marketing, and obtaining business insights), location data collected from mobile devices often contain data from a biased population subset, with some communities over or underrepresented in the collected datasets. As a result, aggregate statistics calculated from such datasets (as is done by various companies including Safegraph, Google, and Facebook), while ignoring the bias, leads to an inaccurate representation of population statistics. Such statistics will not only be generally inaccurate

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Rethinking Drug-Drug Interaction Modeling as Generalizable Relation Learning

Dong Xu, Jiantao Wu, Qihua Pan et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction is central to drug discovery and clinical development, particularly in the context of increasingly prevalent polypharmacy. Although existing computational methods achieve strong performance on standard benchmarks, they often fail to generalize to realistic deployment scenarios, where most candidate drug pairs involve previously unseen drugs and validated interactions are scarce. We demonstrate that proximity in the embedding spaces of prevailing molecule-centric DDI models does not reliably correspond to interaction labels, and that simply scaling up mode

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Counterparty Modeling is Not Strategy: The Limits of LLM Negotiators

Romain Cosentino, Sarath Shekkizhar, Adam Earle et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Negotiation requires more than inferring what the other side wants: it requires using that information to make advantageous offers and counteroffers over multiple turns. We study whether large language model (LLM) agents do this in a controlled multi-attribute bargaining environment. We find that current LLM agents can model a counterparty's preferences, but do not reliably turn that knowledge into strategic bargaining. When given negotiating partner preference information, agents model it accurately and early in their reasoning traces, yet this does not reliably improve outcomes for the infor

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

CroCo: Cross-Lingual Contrastive Preference Tuning on Self-Generations

Mike Zhang, Ali Basirat, Desmond Elliott · 2026 · arXiv

Prior work establishes that controlled contrastiveness between self-generated responses from large language models, set via reward scores, improves downstream preference tuning in English. We extend this method to multiple languages and evaluate two models across a total of 14 high and low-resource languages on a diverse set of tasks. Our central finding is that cross-lingual contrastive preference tuning on self-generations (CroCo) transfers without language-specific preference annotation. A reward model trained on English preferences (atop a multilingual base) produces useful within-language

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