Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Ryosuke Kohita, Seiichiro Yoshioka · 2026 · arXiv
Memes are a popular element of modern web communication, used not only as static artifacts but also as interactive replies within conversations. While computational research has focused on analyzing the intrinsic properties of memes, the dynamic and contextual use of memes to create humor remains an understudied area of web science. To address this gap, we introduce the Meme Reply Selection task and present MaMe-Re (Manga Meme Reply Benchmark), a benchmark of 100,000 human-annotated pairs (500,000 total annotations from 2,325 unique annotators) consisting of openly licensed Japanese manga pane
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics
Laura Stricker, Benjamin Dollet, David Fernandez Rivas et al. · 2013 · arXiv
Acoustically driven air pockets trapped in artificial crevices on a sur- face can emit bubbles which organize in (interacting) bubble clusters. With increasing driving power Fernandez Rivas et al. [Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2010] observed three different behaviors: clusters close to the very pits out of which they had been created, clusters pointing toward each other, and merging clusters. The latter behavior is highly undesired for technological purposes as it is associated with a reduction of the radical production and an enhancement of the erosion of the reactor walls. The dependence on the co
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering
Deepak Singla, Soham Chatterjee, Lavanya Ramapantulu et al. · 2020 · arXiv
Applications in the Internet of Video Things (IoVT) domain have very tight constraints with respect to power and area. While neuromorphic vision sensors (NVS) may offer advantages over traditional imagers in this domain, the existing NVS systems either do not meet the power constraints or have not demonstrated end-to-end system performance. To address this, we improve on a recently proposed hybrid event-frame approach by using morphological image processing algorithms for region proposal and address the low-power requirement for object detection and classification by exploring various convolut
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics
Nicolas Banholzer, Thomas Mellan, H Juliette T Unwin et al. · 2023 · arXiv
Short-term forecasts of infectious disease spread are a critical component in risk evaluation and public health decision making. While different models for short-term forecasting have been developed, open questions about their relative performance remain. Here, we compare short-term probabilistic forecasts of popular mechanistic models based on the renewal equation with forecasts of statistical time series models. Our empirical comparison is based on data of the daily incidence of COVID-19 across six large US states over the first pandemic year. We find that, on average, probabilistic forecast
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Evgeniia Razumovskaia, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen · 2024 · arXiv
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT), supervised instruction tuning (SIT) and in-context learning (ICL) are three alternative, de facto standard approaches to few-shot learning. ICL has gained popularity recently with the advent of LLMs due to its simplicity and sample efficiency. Prior research has conducted only limited investigation into how these approaches work for multilingual few-shot learning, and the focus so far has been mostly on their performance. In this work, we present an extensive and systematic comparison of the three approaches, testing them on 6 high- and low-resource languages, thr
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Zijie Zhao, Roy E. Welsch · 2026 · arXiv
Financial retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems typically rank evidence by textual relevance, but in financial markets evidence utility depends on event type, forecast horizon, and market context. We study news-triggered event-impact prediction as a point-in-time financial RAG problem. For each company-news anchor, the system retrieves financial news and SEC filing passages, appends a pre-decision market-context card, and predicts multi-horizon residual-return signals. Our method keeps the LLM frozen and adapts retrieval through an external Bayesian source memory updated from matured re
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering
Luca Didaci, Sara Maria Pani, Claudio Frongia et al. · 2023 · arXiv
EEG-based biometric represents a relatively recent research field that aims to recognize individuals based on their recorded brain activity by means of electroencephalography (EEG). Among the numerous features that have been proposed, connectivity-based approaches represent one of the more promising methods tested so far. In this paper, we investigate how the performance of an EEG biometric system varies with respect to different time windows to understand if it is possible to define the optimal duration of EEG signal that can be used to extract those distinctive features. Overall, the results
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Baha Eddine Youcef Belmekki, Abdelkrim Hamza, Benoît Escrig · 2018 · arXiv
Vehicular safety communications (VSCs) are known to provide relevant contributions to avoid congestions and prevent road accidents, and more particularly at road intersections since these areas are more prone to accidents. In this context, one of the main impairments that affect the performance of VSCs are interference. In this paper, we develop a tractable framework to model cooperative transmissions in presence of interference for VSCs at intersections. We use tools from stochastic geometry, and model interferer vehicles locations as a Poisson point process. First, we calculate the outage pr
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering
Neil Irwin Bernardo, Jingge Zhu, Jamie Evans · 2021 · arXiv
We analyze the symbol error probability (SEP) of $M$-ary pulse amplitude modulation ($M$-PAM) receivers equipped with optimal low-resolution quantizers. We first show that the optimum detector can be reduced to a simple decision rule. Using this simplification, an exact SEP expression for quantized $M$-PAM receivers is obtained when Nakagami-$m$ fading channel is considered. The derived expression enables the optimization of the quantizer and/or constellation under the minimum SEP criterion. Our analysis of optimal quantization for equidistant $M$-PAM receiver reveals the existence of error fl
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Zachary Baker, Yuxiao Li · 2025 · arXiv
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for interpreting neural network representations by learning sparse, human-interpretable features from dense activations. We investigate whether incorporating variational methods into SAE architectures can improve feature organization and interpretability. We introduce the Variational Sparse Autoencoder (vSAE), which replaces deterministic ReLU gating with stochastic sampling from learned Gaussian posteriors and incorporates KL divergence regularization toward a standard normal prior. Our hypothesis is that this probabilistic sampl
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics
Ben Adcock, Gregor Maier, Rahul Parhi · 2025 · arXiv
We develop a minimax theory for operator learning, where the goal is to estimate an unknown operator between separable Hilbert spaces from finitely many noisy input-output samples. For uniformly bounded Lipschitz operators, we prove information-theoretic lower bounds together with matching or near-matching upper bounds, covering both fixed and random designs under Hilbert-valued Gaussian noise and Gaussian white noise errors. The rates are controlled by the spectrum of the covariance operator of the measure that defines the error metric. Our setup is very general and allows for measures with u
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Ali Subhan, Ashir Raza · 2026 · arXiv
DragDiffusion is a diffusion-based method for interactive point-based image editing that enables users to manipulate images by directly dragging selected points. The method claims that accurate spatial control can be achieved by optimizing a single diffusion latent at an intermediate timestep, together with identity-preserving fine-tuning and spatial regularization. This work presents a reproducibility study of DragDiffusion using the authors' released implementation and the DragBench benchmark. We reproduce the main ablation studies on diffusion timestep selection, LoRA-based fine-tuning, mas
Replication FailureOpen accessComputer Science
Zhichao Fan, Yanhang Li, Zexin Zhuang · 2026 · arXiv
Forced chain-of-thought (CoT) is widely assumed to make vision-language models more reliable on video question answering. We propose a small three-probe evaluation recipe to test that assumption: paired accuracy across direct, CoT, answer-first, and no-video conditions; a counterfactual video-swap diagnostic over the CoT chains; and a four-rung visual-degradation ladder. Each probe is reported under both a strict and a permissive regex scorer, with multiplicity correction over a manuscript-declared primary family. Applied to Qwen2.5-VL on Video-MME subsets, the recipe returns a two-part findin
Replication FailureOpen accessComputer Science
Xiqi Hao, Zengqing Wu, Yu-Xuan Qiu et al. · 2026 · arXiv
Multi-agent debate (MAD) is a promising strategy for improving LLM reasoning, but when agents converge on a shared answer, it is unclear whether that convergence reflects genuine deliberation or social compliance. We show that the conventional answer flip rate conflates three distinct mechanisms: spontaneous instability, stance-induced conformity, and reasoning-induced persuasion. Our three-source decomposition framework isolates each through controlled counterfactual conditions. In the primary MMLU-Pro setting, 37% of agent-question observations change under self-reflection alone, while robus
Replication FailureOpen accessComputer Science
J. Jon Ryu, Pavan Yeddanapudi, Xiangxiang Xu et al. · 2025 · arXiv
The InfoNCE objective, originally introduced for contrastive representation learning, has become a popular choice for mutual information (MI) estimation, despite its indirect connection to MI. In this paper, we demonstrate why InfoNCE should not be regarded as a valid MI estimator, and we introduce a simple modification, which we refer to as InfoNCE-anchor, for accurate MI estimation. Our modification introduces an auxiliary anchor class, enabling consistent density ratio estimation and yielding a plug-in MI estimator with significantly reduced bias. Beyond this, we generalize our framework us
Replication FailureOpen accessMathematics
Natesh Pillai, Aaron Smith · 2026 · arXiv
In Diaconis and Saloff-Coste (1996), the authors introduced the simple ``transvection" walk on $\mathrm{GL}_n(\mathbb F_2)$: at each step, choose two distinct rows and add one to the other. In Ben-Hamou (2025), the author recently proved that this walk has mixing time $O(n^2\log n)$. Inspired by applications in cryptography (see Sotiraki (2016)), Ben-Hamou and Peres (2018) conjectured that the first $k$ columns of this walk mixed in $O(nk \log(n))$ steps. Our main result is a proof of this conjecture uniformly in $n$ and $k.$ Our proof is based on a local-to-global entropy estimate, in the spi
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessOphthalmology
Jia-Wen Li, Yi-Jian Li, Xi-Su Hu et al. · 2020 · International Journal of Ophthalmology
AIM: To assess the biosafety of a poly(acrylamide-co-sodium acrylate) hydrogel (PAH) as a 3D-printed intraocular lens (IOL) material. METHODS: The biosafety of PAH was first evaluated in vitro using human lens epithelial cells (LECs) and the ARPE19 cell line, and a cell counting kit-8 (CCK-8) assay was performed to investigate alterations in cell proliferation. A thin film of PAH and a conventional IOL were intraocularly implanted into the eyes of New Zealand white rabbits respectively, and a sham surgery served as control group. The anterior segment photographs, intraocular pressure (IOP), bl
View details →DOI: 10.18240/ijo.2020.10.03 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDentistry
Fatemeh Maleknejad, Saied Mostafa Moazzami, Elham Baradaran Nasseri et al. · 2011 · Journal of Dental Research, Dental Clinics, Dental Prospects
Background and aims. Adhesive permeability is hindered by application of an additional layer of hydrophobic resin, which increases its concentration within the hydrophilic layer, reduces its affinity to water, and enhances its physical properties. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of a hydrophobic layer on the microleakage of class V composite restorations using different adhesives. Materials and methods. The adhesives including total-etch Scotchbond MP and Single Bond, and the self-etch Clearfil SE Bond and Clearfil S3 Bond were applied to 80 class V cavities in vitro on
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine
Yong Xue, Ai Zhao, Li Cai et al. · 2015 · PLoS ONE
OBJECTIVE:To explore the associations between picky eating behaviour and pre-schoolers' growth and development. Corresponding potential mechanisms, such as nutrient and food subgroup intake, as well as micronutrients in the blood, will be considered. METHODS:Picky eating behaviour was present if it was reported by parents. From various areas of China, 937 healthy children of 3-7 years old were recruited using a multi-stage stratified cluster sampling method. Children and their mothers' socio-demographic information and children's anthropometry, intelligence, blood samples, one 24-hour dietary
View details →DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0123664 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessInternal medicine
Tri Ratnaningsih, Novi W Sukirto, Arum Tri Wahyuningsih · 2020 · Acta Medica Indonesiana
Background: iron deficiency in pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) patients may weaken their immune system, causing difficulty in overcoming the infection. Accurate diagnosis of iron deficiency anemia (IDA) in pulmonary TB patients is essential. In order to prove the iron deficient state, diagnosis should focus on inflammatory factors, which could highly affect the outcome of iron status, such as measurement of serum ferritin (SF). Soluble Transferrin Receptor (sTfR) is the best parameter to diagnose iron deficiency in the inflammatory condition. This study aimed to understand the role of sTfR to iden
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDiseases of the musculoskeletal system
Mohamed A. Mortada, Haidy E. Zidan, Noha A. Abdelsalam et al. · 2020 · Egyptian Rheumatology and Rehabilitation
Abstract Background Impaired deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) repair may induce an autoimmune response in susceptible individuals. The association between DNA repair gene XRCC1 Arg399Gln gene polymorphism and susceptibility of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is controversial. This study aimed to detect the association of XRCC1 Arg399Gln gene polymorphism with SLE and its clinical manifestations in the Egyptian population. Results A significant association was found between weight loss and genotype GG (P = 0.048); however, genotype AG was significantly associated with high serum creatinine and lo
View details →DOI: 10.1186/s43166-020-00009-2 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessImmunologic diseases. Allergy
Hiroyuki Kawahara, Satoshi Hara, Noriko Iwaki et al. · 2025 · Immunological Medicine
TAFRO syndrome is a systemic inflammatory disorder of unknown etiology, and its diagnosis requires the exclusion of autoimmune diseases. A 42-year-old Japanese woman presented with TAFRO syndrome-like manifestations, but had undiagnosed limited-cutaneous systemic sclerosis preventing a definitive diagnosis of TAFRO syndrome. However, her clinical course and pathological findings, including renal glomerular microangiopathy, were consistent with TAFRO syndrome. We performed a systematic review of the literature to evaluate how autoimmunity affects the clinical characteristics of TAFRO syndrome/i
View details →DOI: 10.1080/25785826.2025.2481675 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine
Amr Almaz Abdel-aziem, Amira Hussin Draz · 2013 · Medicine Science
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of chronic ankle instability (CAI) on eccentric peak torque of the ankle musculature. The study included fifty participants divided into two groups; the first group consisted of twenty five subjects suffering from CAI, the second group consisted of twenty five subjects with no prior history of ankle injury as control group. Eccentric peak torque of invertors, evertors, plantar-flexors and dorsiflexors was recorded for each participant at angular velocities 30 and 90o/sec by using (Biodex Medical Systems, Inc, Shirley, NY, USA). Analysis of va
View details →DOI: 10.5455/medscience.2013.02.8048 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine (General)
A.G. Elsaid, N.M. Faheem · Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research
Continuous industrial productivity and modern societies have resulted in excess artificial light. The altered circadian rhythm causes many diseases. During intrauterine life, the mother's maternal melatonin rhythm has a major role in influencing organ development. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of maternal exposure to constant light on the structure and ultrastructure of neonatal skin. Twenty pregnant New Zealand rabbits were divided into two groups (n=10 each): control group (12-h light/dark) and constant light group (24-h light). Plasma maternal melatonin and corticoster
View details →DOI: 10.1590/1414-431x202010722 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessOrthopedic surgery
Ahmet Salduz, Fatih Dikici, Önder Ismet Kılıçoğlu et al. · 2017 · Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery
Purpose: The aim of our study is to investigate the bone ongrowth of two different alternative surfaces and the effect of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) on osseointegration. Methods: Hips of 40 New Zealand white rabbits were operated bilaterally. Hydroxyapatite (HA)-coated titanium rods were implanted into the right femur, and grit-blasted titanium rods were implanted into the left femur. They were divided into three groups. At the end of 8 weeks, both femora of the rabbits were removed and investigated biomechanically and histologically. Results: HA-coated implants had a signif
View details →DOI: 10.1177/2309499016684410 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine
XUE Bing, XI Hualei, YAO Lihong, XU Wanqiu, XU Xiaohang, LIN Song, PIAO Guiyan, WANG Xiumei · 2025 · 口腔疾病防治
Objective To investigate the effect of neurite outgrowth inhibitor extracellular peptide residues 1-40 (NEP1-40) combined with poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) and gelatin electrospun fiber membrane on facial nerve repair in rats. Methods According to the principle of random grouping, 108 male SD rats were divided into four groups ( n = 27 in each group, approved by the ethics committee), namely, the sham group, control group, PLGA group, and NEP1-40 + PLGA group. A facial nerve fracture model was established for all of the groups except for the sham group. The control group received no f
View details →DOI: 10.12016/j.issn.2096-1456.202440237 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEcology
Mnqobi Mamba, Nicolas J. Fasel, Themb'alilahlwa A.M. Mahlaba et al. · 2019 · Global Ecology and Conservation
Conversion of native habitats into agricultural monocultures is a major cause of biodiversity loss favouring a small number of generalist species. Rodents can cause significant declines in crop yield, hence understanding the factors affecting their population dynamics is of importance to the agricultural sector. Sugarcane plantations in African savannas harbour a low diversity of small mammals, with a single genus (Mastomys spp.) often dominating the community. Our study investigated the factors that shape the composition of the small mammal community and the life-history traits of the dominan
View details →DOI: 10.1016/j.gecco.2019.e00752 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAnesthesiology
Hasanul Arifin, Heru Kurniawan · 2016 · Jurnal Anestesi Perioperatif
Serum creatinine has many limitations when being used to diagnose acute kidney injury (AKI), especially in the scope of intensive care unit due to its low sensitivity to depict the kidney dysfunctional level of critically-ill patients. Out of numerous new available biological markers, four biological markers are widely used all over the world to detect AKI, e.g. neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL), cystatin C, KIM-1, and interleukin-18. The purpose of this study was to determine the sensitivity and specificity of serum cystatin C and creatinine in establishing the diagnosis of ac
View details →DOI: 10.15851/jap.v4n2.819 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDiseases of the digestive system. Gastroenterology
Xiaotong Xu, Jinglan Jin, Yuwei Liu et al. · 2023 · BMC Gastroenterology
Abstract Background and aims To investigate the usefulness of interleukin-6 (IL-6), tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), protein C (PC), and thromboelastography (TEG) to serve as a predictor of portal vein thrombosis (PVT) in patients with liver cirrhosis. Additionally, we examined the clinical significance of the above indicators in terms of disease progression. Methods A total of 123 patients with liver cirrhosis were recruited from May 2021 to December 2021, according to the imaging findings. They were divided into the PVT group (n = 52) and the non-PVT group (n = 71). Furthermore, patients
View details →DOI: 10.1186/s12876-022-02632-z Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeoplasms. Tumors. Oncology. Including cancer and carcinogens
Dong-Yun Kim, Eonju Park, Chan Yeong Heo et al. · 2021 · Breast
Purpose: This study investigated whether hypofractionated adjuvant radiotherapy (RT) increased breast-related complication(s) compared to conventional fractionated RT in reconstructed breast cancer patients. Methods: We conducted a retrospective review including 349 breast cancer patients who underwent immediate breast reconstruction following mastectomy or breast-conserving surgery (BCS) between 2009 and 2018 at two institutions. All patients were treated with adjuvant RT via either a conventional fractionated or hypofractionated regimen. We defined a major breast complication as a breast-rel
View details →DOI: 10.1016/j.breast.2020.11.020 