e-ISSN: Pending

Browse the failure-mode index

19,875 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

Will Annotators Disagree? Identifying Subjectivity in Value-Laden Arguments

Amir Homayounirad, Enrico Liscio, Tong Wang et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Aggregating multiple annotations into a single ground truth label may hide valuable insights into annotator disagreement, particularly in tasks where subjectivity plays a crucial role. In this work, we explore methods for identifying subjectivity in recognizing the human values that motivate arguments. We evaluate two main approaches: inferring subjectivity through value prediction vs. directly identifying subjectivity. Our experiments show that direct subjectivity identification significantly improves the model performance of flagging subjective arguments. Furthermore, combining contrastive l

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Performance of Opportunistic Fixed Gain Bidirectional Relaying With Outdated CSI

Fahd Ahmed Khan, Kamel Tourki, Mohamed-Slim Alouini et al. · 2013 · arXiv

This paper studies the impact of using outdated channel state information for relay selection on the performance of a network where two sources communicate with each other via fixed-gain amplifyand- forward relays. For a Rayleigh faded channel, closed-form expressions for the outage probability, moment generating function and symbol error rate are derived. Simulations results are also presented to corroborate the derived analytical results. It is shown that adding relays does not improve the performance if the channel is substantially outdated. Furthermore, relay location is also taken into co

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Optimal Use of Experience in First Person Shooter Environments

Matthew Aitchison · 2019 · arXiv

Although reinforcement learning has made great strides recently, a continuing limitation is that it requires an extremely high number of interactions with the environment. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of reusing experience from the experience replay buffer in the Deep Q-Learning algorithm. We test the effectiveness of applying learning update steps multiple times per environmental step in the VizDoom environment and show first, this requires a change in the learning rate, and second that it does not improve the performance of the agent. Furthermore, we show that updating less fr

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Does enforcing fairness mitigate biases caused by subpopulation shift?

Subha Maity, Debarghya Mukherjee, Mikhail Yurochkin et al. · 2020 · arXiv

Many instances of algorithmic bias are caused by subpopulation shifts. For example, ML models often perform worse on demographic groups that are underrepresented in the training data. In this paper, we study whether enforcing algorithmic fairness during training improves the performance of the trained model in the \emph{target domain}. On one hand, we conceive scenarios in which enforcing fairness does not improve performance in the target domain. In fact, it may even harm performance. On the other hand, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which enforcing algorithmic fairness l

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Mitigating Errors in DC Magnetometry via Zero-Noise Extrapolation

John S. Van Dyke, Zackary White, Gregory Quiroz · 2024 · arXiv

Zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE), a technique to estimate quantum circuit expectation values through noise scaling and extrapolation, is well-studied in the context of quantum computing. We examine the applicability of ZNE to the field of quantum sensing. Focusing on the problem of DC magnetometry using the Ramsey protocol, we show that the sensitivity (in the sense of the minimum detectable signal) does not improve upon using ZNE in the slope detection scheme. On the other hand, signals of sufficiently large magnitude can be estimated more accurately. Our results are robust across various noise

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Prediction of Platinum Prices Using Dynamically Weighted Mixture of Experts

Baruch Lubinsky, Bekir Genc, Tshilidzi Marwala · 2008 · arXiv

Neural networks are powerful tools for classification and regression in static environments. This paper describes a technique for creating an ensemble of neural networks that adapts dynamically to changing conditions. The model separates the input space into four regions and each network is given a weight in each region based on its performance on samples from that region. The ensemble adapts dynamically by constantly adjusting these weights based on the current performance of the networks. The data set used is a collection of financial indicators with the goal of predicting the future platinu

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Persistence Homology of TEDtalk: Do Sentence Embeddings Have a Topological Shape?

Shouman Das, Syed A. Haque, Md. Iftekhar Tanveer · 2021 · arXiv

\emph{Topological data analysis} (TDA) has recently emerged as a new technique to extract meaningful discriminitve features from high dimensional data. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of applying TDA to improve the classification accuracy of public speaking rating. We calculated \emph{persistence image vectors} for the sentence embeddings of TEDtalk data and feed this vectors as additional inputs to our machine learning models. We have found a negative result that this topological information does not improve the model accuracy significantly. In some cases, it makes the accuracy

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Perfect Discrimination of Non-Orthogonal Separable Pure States on Bipartite System in General Probabilistic Theory

Hayato Arai, Yuuya Yoshida, Masahito Hayashi · 2019 · arXiv

We address perfect discrimination of two separable states. When available states are restricted to separable states, we can theoretically consider a larger class of measurements than the class of measurements allowed in quantum theory. The framework composed of the class of separable states and the above extended class of measurements is a typical example of general probabilistic theories. In this framework, we give a necessary and sufficient condition to discriminate two separable pure states perfectly. In particular, we derive measurements explicitly to discriminate two separable pure states

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Judgment in macroeconomic output growth predictions: Efficiency, accuracy and persistence

Michael Pedersen · 2024 · arXiv

The present study applies observations of individual predictions of the first three releases of the US output growth rate to evaluate how the applied judgment affects prediction efficiency and accuracy as well as if judgment is persistent. While the first two issues have been assessed in other studies, there is little evidence on the formation of judgment in macroeconomic projections. Most of the forecasters produce unbiased predictions, but employing the median Bloomberg projection as baseline, it turns out that judgment generally does not improve accuracy. There seems to be persistence in th

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Quantum and private capacities of low-noise channels

Felix Leditzky, Debbie Leung, Graeme Smith · 2017 · arXiv

We determine both the quantum and the private capacities of low-noise quantum channels to leading orders in the channel's distance to the perfect channel. It has been an open problem for more than 20 years to determine the capacities of some of these low-noise channels such as the depolarizing channel. We also show that both capacities are equal to the single-letter coherent information of the channel, again to leading orders. We thus find that, in the low noise regime, super-additivity and degenerate codes have negligible benefit for the quantum capacity, and shielding does not improve the pr

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

On lower bounds of the density of planar periodic sets without unit distances

Alexander Tolmachev · 2024 · arXiv

Determining the maximal density $m_1(\mathbb{R}^2)$ of planar sets without unit distances is a fundamental problem in combinatorial geometry. This paper investigates lower bounds for this quantity. We introduce a novel approach to estimating $m_1(\mathbb{R}^2)$ by reformulating the problem as a Maximal Independent Set (MIS) problem on graphs constructed from flat torus, focusing on periodic sets with respect to two non-collinear vectors. Our experimental results, supported by theoretical justifications of proposed method, demonstrate that for a sufficiently wide range of parameters this approa

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Three-dimensional physics and the pressure of hot QCD

A. Hietanen, K. Kajantie, M. Laine et al. · 2008 · arXiv

We update Monte Carlo simulations of the three-dimensional SU(3) + adjoint Higgs theory, by extrapolating carefully to the infinite volume and continuum limits, in order to estimate the contribution of the infrared modes to the pressure of hot QCD. The sum of infrared contributions beyond the known 4-loop order turns out to be a smooth function, of a reasonable magnitude and specific sign. Unfortunately, adding this function to the known 4-loop terms does not improve the match to four-dimensional lattice data, in spite of the fact that other quantities, such as correlation lengths, spatial str

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Temporal coherence of optical fields in the presence of entanglement

Yunxiao Zhang, Nan Huo, Liang Cui et al. · 2022 · arXiv

In classical coherence theory, coherence time is typically related to the bandwidth of the optical field. Narrowing the bandwidth will result in the lengthening of the coherence time. This will erase temporal distinguishability of photons due to time delay in pulsed photon interference. However, this is changed in an SU(1,1)-type quantum interferometer where quantum entanglement is involved. In this paper, we investigate how the temporal coherence of the fields in a pulse-pumped SU(1,1) interferometer changes with the bandwidth of optical filtering. We find that, because of the quantum entangl

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The Whole is Better than the Sum: Using Aggregated Demonstrations in In-Context Learning for Sequential Recommendation

Lei Wang, Ee-Peng Lim · 2024 · arXiv

Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent performance on various NLP tasks. To use LLMs as strong sequential recommenders, we explore the in-context learning approach to sequential recommendation. We investigate the effects of instruction format, task consistency, demonstration selection, and number of demonstrations. As increasing the number of demonstrations in ICL does not improve accuracy despite using a long prompt, we propose a novel method called LLMSRec-Syn that incorporates multiple demonstration users into one aggregated demonstration. Our experiments on three recommendation

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Is It Worth the Attention? A Comparative Evaluation of Attention Layers for Argument Unit Segmentation

Maximilian Spliethöver, Jonas Klaff, Hendrik Heuer · 2019 · arXiv

Attention mechanisms have seen some success for natural language processing downstream tasks in recent years and generated new State-of-the-Art results. A thorough evaluation of the attention mechanism for the task of Argumentation Mining is missing, though. With this paper, we report a comparative evaluation of attention layers in combination with a bidirectional long short-term memory network, which is the current state-of-the-art approach to the unit segmentation task. We also compare sentence-level contextualized word embeddings to pre-generated ones. Our findings suggest that for this tas

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Few More Examples May Be Worth Billions of Parameters

Yuval Kirstain, Patrick Lewis, Sebastian Riedel et al. · 2021 · arXiv

We investigate the dynamics of increasing the number of model parameters versus the number of labeled examples across a wide variety of tasks. Our exploration reveals that while scaling parameters consistently yields performance improvements, the contribution of additional examples highly depends on the task's format. Specifically, in open question answering tasks, enlarging the training set does not improve performance. In contrast, classification, extractive question answering, and multiple choice tasks benefit so much from additional examples that collecting a few hundred examples is often

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

The Second Picard iteration of NLS on the $2d$ sphere does not regularize Gaussian random initial data

Nicolas Burq, Nicolas Camps, Mickaël Latocca et al. · 2024 · arXiv

We consider the Wick ordered cubic Schrödinger equation (NLS) posed on the two-dimensional sphere, with initial data distributed according to a Gaussian measure. We show that the second Picard iteration does not improve the regularity of the initial data in the scale of the classical Sobolev spaces. This is in sharp contrast with the Wick ordered NLS on the two-dimensional tori, a model for which we know from the work of Bourgain that the second Picard iteration gains one half derivative. Our proof relies on identifying a singular part of the nonlinearity. We show that this singular part is re

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Entanglement production by independent quantum channels

Örs Legeza, Florian Gebhard, Jörg Rissler · 2005 · arXiv

For the one-dimensional Hubbard model subject to periodic boundary conditions we construct a unitary transformation between basis states so that open boundary conditions apply for the transformed Hamiltonian. Despite the fact that the one-particle and two-particle interaction matrices link nearest and next-nearest neighbors only, the performance of the density-matrix renormalization group method for the transformed Hamiltonian does not improve. Some of the new interactions act as independent quantum channels which generate the same level of entanglement as periodic boundary conditions in the o

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

New Physics effect on $B_c \to J/ψτ\barν$ in relation to the $R_{D^{(*)}}$ anomaly

Ryoutaro Watanabe · 2017 · arXiv

We study possible new physics (NP) effects on $B_c \to J/ψτ\barν$, which has been recently measured at LHCb as the ratio of $R_{J/ψ} = \mathcal B(B_c \to J/ψτ\barν)/\mathcal B(B_c \to J/ψμ\barν)$. Combining it with the long-standing $R_{D^{(*)}}$ measurements, in which the discrepancy with the prediction of the standard model is present, we find possible solutions to the anomaly by several NP types. Then, we see that adding the $R_{J/ψ}$ measurement does not improve NP fit to data, but the NP scenarios still give better $χ^2$ than the SM. We also investigate indirect NP constraints from the li

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Appearance and disappearance signals at a beta-Beam and a Super-Beam facility

A. Donini, E. Fernandez-Martinez, S. Rigolin · 2004 · arXiv

In this letter we present the study of the eightfold degeneracy in the $(θ_{13},δ)$ measurement including both appearance and disappearance channels. We analyse, for definiteness, the case of a standard low-$γ$ $β$-Beam and a 4 MWatt SPL Super-Beam facility, both aiming at a UNO-like Mton water Cerenkov detector located at the Frejus laboratory, $L = 130$ km. In the $β$-Beam case, the \nue disappearance channel does not improve the $(θ_{13},δ)$ measurement when a realistic (i.e. $\ge$ 2%) systematic error is included. In the Super-Beam case, the \numu disappearance channel could, instead, be q

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Note on Over-Smoothing for Graph Neural Networks

Chen Cai, Yusu Wang · 2020 · arXiv

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved a lot of success on graph-structured data. However, it is observed that the performance of graph neural networks does not improve as the number of layers increases. This effect, known as over-smoothing, has been analyzed mostly in linear cases. In this paper, we build upon previous results \cite{oono2019graph} to further analyze the over-smoothing effect in the general graph neural network architecture. We show when the weight matrix satisfies the conditions determined by the spectrum of augmented normalized Laplacian, the Dirichlet energy of embeddin

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

LMN at SemEval-2022 Task 11: A Transformer-based System for English Named Entity Recognition

Ngoc Minh Lai · 2022 · arXiv

Processing complex and ambiguous named entities is a challenging research problem, but it has not received sufficient attention from the natural language processing community. In this short paper, we present our participation in the English track of SemEval-2022 Task 11: Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition. Inspired by the recent advances in pretrained Transformer language models, we propose a simple yet effective Transformer-based baseline for the task. Despite its simplicity, our proposed approach shows competitive results in the leaderboard as we ranked 12 over 30 teams. Our syste

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Learned Image Compression for Earth Observation: Implications for Downstream Segmentation Tasks

Christian Mollière, Iker Cumplido, Marco Zeulner et al. · 2025 · arXiv

The rapid growth of data from satellite-based Earth observation (EO) systems poses significant challenges in data transmission and storage. We evaluate the potential of task-specific learned compression algorithms in this context to reduce data volumes while retaining crucial information. In detail, we compare traditional compression (JPEG 2000) versus a learned compression approach (Discretized Mixed Gaussian Likelihood) on three EO segmentation tasks: Fire, cloud, and building detection. Learned compression notably outperforms JPEG 2000 for large-scale, multi-channel optical imagery in both

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

On the numerical stability of the least-squares method for the planar scattering by obstacles

Gilles Chardon · 2014 · arXiv

The scattering of waves by obstacles in a 2D setting is considered, in particular the computation of the scattered field via the collocation or the least-squares methods. In the case of multiple scattering by smooth obstacles, we prove that the scattered field can be uniformly approximated by sums of multipoles. For a unique obstacle, the choice of the number of points and their positions for the estimation of the error on the border of the scatterer is studied, showing the benefit of using a non-uniform distribution of points dependent on the scatterer and the approximation scheme. In general

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

On the Accuracy of Replication Failure Rates.

Schauer JM · 2023 · Multivariate behavioral research

A prominent approach to studying the replication crisis has been to conduct replications of several different scientific findings as part of the same research effort. The reported proportion of findings that these programs determined…

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Improving Low Compute Language Modeling with In-Domain Embedding Initialisation

Charles Welch, Rada Mihalcea, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld · 2020 · arXiv

Many NLP applications, such as biomedical data and technical support, have 10-100 million tokens of in-domain data and limited computational resources for learning from it. How should we train a language model in this scenario? Most language modeling research considers either a small dataset with a closed vocabulary (like the standard 1 million token Penn Treebank), or the whole web with byte-pair encoding. We show that for our target setting in English, initialising and freezing input embeddings using in-domain data can improve language model performance by providing a useful representation o

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

IUTEAM1 at MEDIQA-Chat 2023: Is simple fine tuning effective for multilayer summarization of clinical conversations?

Dhananjay Srivastava · 2023 · arXiv

Clinical conversation summarization has become an important application of Natural language Processing. In this work, we intend to analyze summarization model ensembling approaches, that can be utilized to improve the overall accuracy of the generated medical report called chart note. The work starts with a single summarization model creating the baseline. Then leads to an ensemble of summarization models trained on a separate section of the chart note. This leads to the final approach of passing the generated results to another summarization model in a multi-layer/stage fashion for better coh

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Topological based classification using graph convolutional networks

Roy Abel, Idan Benami, Yoram Louzoun · 2019 · arXiv

In colored graphs, node classes are often associated with either their neighbors class or with information not incorporated in the graph associated with each node. We here propose that node classes are also associated with topological features of the nodes. We use this association to improve Graph machine learning in general and specifically, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). First, we show that even in the absence of any external information on nodes, a good accuracy can be obtained on the prediction of the node class using either topological features, or using the neighbors class as an inp

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Loop as a Bridge: Can Looped Transformers Truly Link Representation Space and Natural Language Outputs?

Guanxu Chen, Dongrui Liu, Jing Shao · 2026 · arXiv

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit a gap between their internal knowledge and their explicit linguistic outputs. In this report, we empirically investigate whether Looped Transformers (LTs)--architectures that increase computational depth by iterating shared layers--can bridge this gap by utilizing their iterative nature as a form of introspection. Our experiments reveal that while increasing loop iterations narrows the gap, it is partly driven by a degradation of their internal knowledge carried by representations. Moreover, another empirical analysis suggests that current LTs' abilit

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Column generation for the discrete Unit Commitment problem with min-stop ramping constraints

Nicolas Dupin · 2019 · arXiv

The discrete unit commitment problem with min-stop ramping constraints optimizes the daily production of thermal power plants (coal, gas, fuel units). For this problem, compact Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulations have been designed to solve exactly small instances and heuristically real-size instances. This paper investigates whether Dantzig-Wolfe reformulation allows to improve the previous exact method and matheuristics. The extended ILP formulation is presented with the column generation algorithm to solve its linear relaxation. The experimental results show that the Dantzig-Wolfe

View details →