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Failure-mode index

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A searchable index of real negative results, null findings, and replication failures from the published literature — so you can learn what didn't work before repeating it.

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record (title, authors, DOI) compiled from open scholarly databases, with the abstract shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed (e.g. Creative Commons); otherwise a short excerpt is shown for reference under fair use. WASTE classifies each work by failure type; classifications are automated and approximate.

78 results in Negative / Null Result Report for "deep learning" · page 3 of 3

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Opening the Black Box: Towards inherently interpretable energy data imputation models using building physics insight

Antonio Liguori, Matias Quintana, Chun Fu et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Missing data are frequently observed by practitioners and researchers in the building energy modeling community. In this regard, advanced data-driven solutions, such as Deep Learning methods, are typically required to reflect the non-linear behavior of these anomalies. As an ongoing research question related to Deep Learning, a model's applicability to limited data settings can be explored by introducing prior knowledge in the network. This same strategy can also lead to more interpretable predictions, hence facilitating the field application of the approach. For that purpose, the aim of this

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Regularizing Recurrent Networks - On Injected Noise and Norm-based Methods

Saahil Ognawala, Justin Bayer · 2014 · arXiv

Advancements in parallel processing have lead to a surge in multilayer perceptrons' (MLP) applications and deep learning in the past decades. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) give additional representational power to feedforward MLPs by providing a way to treat sequential data. However, RNNs are hard to train using conventional error backpropagation methods because of the difficulty in relating inputs over many time-steps. Regularization approaches from MLP sphere, like dropout and noisy weight training, have been insufficiently applied and tested on simple RNNs. Moreover, solutions have been

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards Generalist Robot Learning from Internet Video: A Survey

Robert McCarthy, Daniel C. H. Tan, Dominik Schmidt et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Scaling deep learning to massive and diverse internet data has driven remarkable breakthroughs in domains such as video generation and natural language processing. Robot learning, however, has thus far failed to replicate this success and remains constrained by a scarcity of available data. Learning from videos (LfV) methods aim to address this data bottleneck by augmenting traditional robot data with large-scale internet video. This video data provides foundational information regarding physical dynamics, behaviours, and tasks, and can be highly informative for general-purpose robots. This su

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

Generative Style Transfer for MRI Image Segmentation: A Case of Glioma Segmentation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Rancy Chepchirchir, Jill Sunday, Raymond Confidence et al. · 2025 · arXiv

In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the utilization of lower-quality Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technology raises questions about the applicability of machine learning methods for clinical tasks. This study aims to provide a robust deep learning-based brain tumor segmentation (BraTS) method tailored for the SSA population using a threefold approach. Firstly, the impact of domain shift from the SSA training data on model efficacy was examined, revealing no significant effect. Secondly, a comparative analysis of 3D and 2D full-resolution models using the nnU-Net framework indicates similar perfor

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

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

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Linguistic Features for Readability Assessment

Tovly Deutsch, Masoud Jasbi, Stuart Shieber · 2020 · arXiv

Readability assessment aims to automatically classify text by the level appropriate for learning readers. Traditional approaches to this task utilize a variety of linguistically motivated features paired with simple machine learning models. More recent methods have improved performance by discarding these features and utilizing deep learning models. However, it is unknown whether augmenting deep learning models with linguistically motivated features would improve performance further. This paper combines these two approaches with the goal of improving overall model performance and addressing th

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Compressing BERT: Studying the Effects of Weight Pruning on Transfer Learning

Mitchell A. Gordon, Kevin Duh, Nicholas Andrews · 2020 · arXiv

Pre-trained universal feature extractors, such as BERT for natural language processing and VGG for computer vision, have become effective methods for improving deep learning models without requiring more labeled data. While effective, feature extractors like BERT may be prohibitively large for some deployment scenarios. We explore weight pruning for BERT and ask: how does compression during pre-training affect transfer learning? We find that pruning affects transfer learning in three broad regimes. Low levels of pruning (30-40%) do not affect pre-training loss or transfer to downstream tasks a

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards Deep Robot Learning with Optimizer applicable to Non-stationary Problems

Taisuke Kobayashi · 2020 · arXiv

This paper proposes a new optimizer for deep learning, named d-AmsGrad. In the real-world data, noise and outliers cannot be excluded from dataset to be used for learning robot skills. This problem is especially striking for robots that learn by collecting data in real time, which cannot be sorted manually. Several noise-robust optimizers have therefore been developed to resolve this problem, and one of them, named AmsGrad, which is a variant of Adam optimizer, has a proof of its convergence. However, in practice, it does not improve learning performance in robotics scenarios. This reason is h

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The Curious Case of Visual Grounding: Different Effects for Speech- and Text-based Language Encoders

Adrian Sauter, Willem Zuidema, Marianne de Heer Kloots · 2025 · arXiv

How does visual information included in training affect language processing in audio- and text-based deep learning models? We explore how such visual grounding affects model-internal representations of words, and find substantially different effects in speech- vs. text-based language encoders. Firstly, global representational comparisons reveal that visual grounding increases alignment between representations of spoken and written language, but this effect seems mainly driven by enhanced encoding of word identity rather than meaning. We then apply targeted clustering analyses to probe for phon

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

Neuro-MoBRE: Exploring Multi-subject Multi-task Intracranial Decoding via Explicit Heterogeneity Resolving

Di Wu, Yifei Jia, Siyuan Li et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Neurophysiological decoding, fundamental to advancing brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies, has significantly benefited from recent advances in deep learning. However, existing decoding approaches largely remain constrained to single-task scenarios and individual subjects, limiting their broader applicability and generalizability. Efforts towards creating large-scale neurophysiological foundation models have shown promise, but continue to struggle with significant challenges due to pervasive data heterogeneity across subjects and decoding tasks. Simply increasing model parameters and da

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Look-ups are not (yet) all you need for deep learning inference

Calvin McCarter, Nicholas Dronen · 2022 · arXiv

Fast approximations to matrix multiplication have the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of neural network inference. Recent work on approximate matrix multiplication proposed to replace costly multiplications with table-lookups by fitting a fast hash function from training data. In this work, we propose improvements to this previous work, targeted to the deep learning inference setting, where one has access to both training data and fixed (already learned) model weight matrices. We further propose a fine-tuning procedure for accelerating entire neural networks while minimizing loss in

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

MedNet-PVS: A MedNeXt-Based Deep Learning Model for Automated Segmentation of Perivascular Spaces

Zhen Xuen Brandon Low, Rory Zhang, Hang Min et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Enlarged perivascular spaces (PVS) are increasingly recognized as biomarkers of cerebral small vessel disease, Alzheimer's disease, stroke, and aging-related neurodegeneration. However, manual segmentation of PVS is time-consuming and subject to moderate inter-rater reliability, while existing automated deep learning models have moderate performance and typically fail to generalize across diverse clinical and research MRI datasets. We adapted MedNeXt-L-k5, a Transformer-inspired 3D encoder-decoder convolutional network, for automated PVS segmentation. Two models were trained: one using a homog

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Plastic Contaminant Detection in Aerial Imagery of Cotton Fields with Deep Learning

Pappu Kumar Yadav, J. Alex Thomasson, Robert G. Hardin et al. · 2022 · arXiv

Plastic shopping bags that get carried away from the side of roads and tangled on cotton plants can end up at cotton gins if not removed before the harvest. Such bags may not only cause problem in the ginning process but might also get embodied in cotton fibers reducing its quality and marketable value. Therefore, it is required to detect, locate, and remove the bags before cotton is harvested. Manually detecting and locating these bags in cotton fields is labor intensive, time-consuming and a costly process. To solve these challenges, we present application of four variants of YOLOv5 (YOLOv5s

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Evaluation of Randomization through Style Transfer for Enhanced Domain Generalization

Dustin Eisenhardt, Timothy Schaumlöffel, Alperen Kantarci et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Deep learning models for computer vision often suffer from poor generalization when deployed in real-world settings, especially when trained on synthetic data due to the well-known Sim2Real gap. Despite the growing popularity of style transfer as a data augmentation strategy for domain generalization, the literature contains unresolved contradictions regarding three key design axes: the diversity of the style pool, the role of texture complexity, and the choice of style source. We present a systematic empirical study that isolates and evaluates each of these factors for driving scene understan

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Rethinking Neural Width for Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow Proxies

Dhruvi Khandelwal, Anurag Basistha, Ayushi Jolotia et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Deep learning proxies for Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow (ACOPF) lack systematic methods for determining architectural size. This paper conducts a constructive thought experiment to answer a fundamental inquiry: how wide must a neural network be to almost accurately approximate the ACOPF manifold? We introduce a Loss-Guided Neural Densification (LG-ND) algorithm that incrementally discovers necessary capacity by expanding only when the current deep neural network topology fails to improve further. Empirical results across various IEEE systems show that LG-ND achieves performance parity