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Failure-mode index

Search what already failed

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.

21294 results · page 339 of 710

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The Capacity of MIMO Channels with Per-Antenna Power Constraint

Mai Vu · 2011 · arXiv

We establish the optimal input signaling and the capacity of MIMO channels under per-antenna power constraint. While admitting a linear eigenbeam structure, the optimal input is no longer diagonalizable by the channel right singular vectors as with sum power constraint. We formulate the capacity optimization as an SDP problem and solve in closed-form the optimal input covariance as a function of the dual variable. We then design an efficient algorithm to find this optimal input signaling for all channel sizes. The proposed algorithm allows for straightforward implementation in practical system

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Modeling and Optimization of Two-Terminal Spin-Orbit-Torque MRAM

Md Nahid Haque Shazon, Piyush Kumar, Luqiao Liu et al. · 2025 · arXiv

This paper presents physical modeling and benchmarking for two-terminal spin-orbit torque magnetic random-access memory (2T-SOT-MRAM). The results indicate that the common SOT materials that provide only in-plane torque can provide little to no improvement over spin-transfer-torque (STT) MRAM in terms of write energy. However, emerging SOT materials that provide out-of-plane torques with efficiencies as small as 0.1 can result in significant improvements in the write energy for such 2-terminal devices, especially when the magnet lateral dimensions are scaled down to 30 or 20 nm. Additionally,

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Loose LIPS Sink Ships: Asking Questions in Battleship with Language-Informed Program Sampling

Gabriel Grand, Valerio Pepe, Jacob Andreas et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Questions combine our mastery of language with our remarkable facility for reasoning about uncertainty. How do people navigate vast hypothesis spaces to pose informative questions given limited cognitive resources? We study these tradeoffs in a classic grounded question-asking task based on the board game Battleship. Our language-informed program sampling (LIPS) model uses large language models (LLMs) to generate natural language questions, translate them into symbolic programs, and evaluate their expected information gain. We find that with a surprisingly modest resource budget, this simple M

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Coherent-Classical Estimation for Linear Quantum Systems

Shibdas Roy, Ian R. Petersen, Elanor H. Huntington · 2015 · arXiv

We study a coherent-classical estimation scheme for a class of linear quantum systems, where the estimator is a mixed quantum-classical system that may or may not involve coherent feedback. We show that when the quantum plant or the quantum part of the estimator (coherent controller) is an annihilation operator only system, coherent-classical estimation without coherent feedback can provide no improvement over purely-classical estimation. Otherwise, coherent-classical estimation without feedback can be better than classical-only estimation for certain homodyne detector angles, although the for

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On the Effectiveness of Mode Exploration in Bayesian Model Averaging for Neural Networks

John T. Holodnak, Allan B. Wollaber · 2021 · arXiv

Multiple techniques for producing calibrated predictive probabilities using deep neural networks in supervised learning settings have emerged that leverage approaches to ensemble diverse solutions discovered during cyclic training or training from multiple random starting points (deep ensembles). However, only a limited amount of work has investigated the utility of exploring the local region around each diverse solution (posterior mode). Using three well-known deep architectures on the CIFAR-10 dataset, we evaluate several simple methods for exploring local regions of the weight space with re

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

The effects of radiation on Gallium Arsenide radiation detectors

R. L. Bates, C. Da'Via, S. D'Auria et al. · 1997 · arXiv

Semi-insulating, undoped, Liquid Encapsulated Czochralski (SI-U LEC) GaAs detectors have been irradiated with 1MeV neutrons, 24GeV/c protons, and 300MeV/c pions. The maximum fluences used were 6, 3, and 1.8~10$^{14}$ particles/cm$^{2}$ respectively. For all three types of irradiation the charge collection efficiencies (cce) of the detector are reduced due to the reduction in the electron and hole mean free paths. Pion and proton irradiations produce a greater reduction in cce than neutron irradiation with the pions having the greatest effect. The effect of annealing the detectors at room tempe

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards Single Exponential Time for Temporal and Spatial Reasoning: A Study via Redundancy and Dynamic Programming

Victor Lagerkvist, Johanna Groven, Leif Eriksson · 2026 · arXiv

The region connection calculus ($RCC$) and Allen's interval algebra ($IA$) are two well-known NP-hard spatial-temporal qualitative reasoning problems. They are solvable in $2^{O(n \log n)}$ time, where $n$ is the number of variables, and $IA$ is additionally known to be solvable in $o(n)^n$ time. However, no improvement over exhaustive search is known for $RCC$, and if they are also solvable in single exponential time $2^{O(n)}$ is unknown. We investigate multiple avenues towards reaching such bounds. First, we show that branching is insufficient since there are too many non-redundant constrai

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Experience Sharing Between Cooperative Reinforcement Learning Agents

Lucas Oliveira Souza, Gabriel de Oliveira Ramos, Celia Ghedini Ralha · 2019 · arXiv

The idea of experience sharing between cooperative agents naturally emerges from our understanding of how humans learn. Our evolution as a species is tightly linked to the ability to exchange learned knowledge with one another. It follows that experience sharing (ES) between autonomous and independent agents could become the key to accelerate learning in cooperative multiagent settings. We investigate if randomly selecting experiences to share can increase the performance of deep reinforcement learning agents, and propose three new methods for selecting experiences to accelerate the learning p

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Multi-level algorithms for modularity clustering

Andreas Noack, Randolf Rotta · 2008 · arXiv

Modularity is one of the most widely used quality measures for graph clusterings. Maximizing modularity is NP-hard, and the runtime of exact algorithms is prohibitive for large graphs. A simple and effective class of heuristics coarsens the graph by iteratively merging clusters (starting from singletons), and optionally refines the resulting clustering by iteratively moving individual vertices between clusters. Several heuristics of this type have been proposed in the literature, but little is known about their relative performance. This paper experimentally compares existing and new coarsenin

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Bounded Memory Active Learning through Enriched Queries

Max Hopkins, Daniel Kane, Shachar Lovett et al. · 2021 · arXiv

The explosive growth of easily-accessible unlabeled data has lead to growing interest in active learning, a paradigm in which data-hungry learning algorithms adaptively select informative examples in order to lower prohibitively expensive labeling costs. Unfortunately, in standard worst-case models of learning, the active setting often provides no improvement over non-adaptive algorithms. To combat this, a series of recent works have considered a model in which the learner may ask enriched queries beyond labels. While such models have seen success in drastically lowering label costs, they tend

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Lee-Huang-Yang dynamics emergent from a direct Wigner representation

King Lun Ng, Maciej Bartłomiej Kruk, Piotr Deuar · 2026 · arXiv

We demonstrate how the beyond-mean-field Lee-Huang-Yang (LHY) corrections and its related physics can be naturally incorporated into the representation of an ultracold Bose gas using the truncated Wigner approach without invoking effective energy terms or local density assumptions. By generating a Bogoliubov ground-state representation with appropriately tailored bare interaction strength $g_0$ and condensate density $n_0$, the expected initial energy and densities are obtained while retaining access to quantum effects beyond the reach of the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation (EGPE) formulati

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Scalable Approach for Normalizing E-commerce Text Attributes (SANTA)

Ravi Shankar Mishra, Kartik Mehta, Nikhil Rasiwasia · 2021 · arXiv

In this paper, we present SANTA, a scalable framework to automatically normalize E-commerce attribute values (e.g. "Win 10 Pro") to a fixed set of pre-defined canonical values (e.g. "Windows 10"). Earlier works on attribute normalization focused on fuzzy string matching (also referred as syntactic matching in this paper). In this work, we first perform an extensive study of nine syntactic matching algorithms and establish that 'cosine' similarity leads to best results, showing 2.7% improvement over commonly used Jaccard index. Next, we argue that string similarity alone is not sufficient for a

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Monte-Carlo Planning: Theoretically Fast Convergence Meets Practical Efficiency

Zohar Feldman, Carmel Domshlak · 2013 · arXiv

Popular Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithms for online planning, such as epsilon-greedy tree search and UCT, aim at rapidly identifying a reasonably good action, but provide rather poor worst-case guarantees on performance improvement over time. In contrast, a recently introduced MCTS algorithm BRUE guarantees exponential-rate improvement over time, yet it is not geared towards identifying reasonably good choices right at the go. We take a stand on the individual strengths of these two classes of algorithms, and show how they can be effectively connected. We then rationalize a principle

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Path-Extrema Upper Bounds on Mean Entropy Production

Surachate Limkumnerd · 2026 · arXiv

Fluctuation relations imply the second-law inequality $\langleΣ_T\rangle\ge0$, but path extrema can also constrain how large the mean entropy production can be. For steady-state processes with entropy-production martingale $M_t=e^{-Σ_t}$, we show that knowing only the positive running maximum of $Σ_t$ gives no improvement over the trivial endpoint bound: rare negative entropy-production excursions can still carry the exponential weight required by the fluctuation relation. Using the running extrema $L_T=\inf M_t$ and $H_T=\sup M_t$, we derive a path-extrema upper envelope $\mathcal{U}_{\rm ext

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Rumour Evaluation with Very Large Language Models

Dahlia Shehata, Robin Cohen, Charles Clarke · 2024 · arXiv

Conversational prompt-engineering-based large language models (LLMs) have enabled targeted control over the output creation, enhancing versatility, adaptability and adhoc retrieval. From another perspective, digital misinformation has reached alarming levels. The anonymity, availability and reach of social media offer fertile ground for rumours to propagate. This work proposes to leverage the advancement of prompting-dependent LLMs to combat misinformation by extending the research efforts of the RumourEval task on its Twitter dataset. To the end, we employ two prompting-based LLM variants (GP

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

An efficient magic state approach to small angle rotations

Earl T. Campbell, Joe O'Gorman · 2016 · arXiv

Standard error correction techniques only provide a quantum memory and need extra gadgets to perform computation. Central to quantum algorithms are small angle rotations, which can be fault-tolerantly implemented given a supply of an unconventional species of magic state. We present a low-cost distillation routine for preparing these small angle magic states. Our protocol builds on the work of Duclos-Cianci and Poulin [Phys. Rev. A, 91, 042315 (2015)] by compressing their circuit. Additionally, we present a method of diluting magic states that reduces costs associated with very small angle rot

Abandoned HypothesisOpen accessComputer Science

Active Learning with Selective Time-Step Acquisition for PDEs

Yegon Kim, Hyunsu Kim, Gyeonghoon Ko et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Accurately solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is critical to understanding complex scientific and engineering phenomena, yet traditional numerical solvers are computationally expensive. Surrogate models offer a more efficient alternative, but their development is hindered by the cost of generating sufficient training data from numerical solvers. In this paper, we present a novel framework for active learning in PDE surrogate modeling that reduces this cost. Unlike the existing AL methods for PDEs that always acquire entire PDE trajectories, our approach, STAP (**S**elective **T**ime

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

TCG CREST System Description for the Second DISPLACE Challenge

Nikhil Raghav, Subhajit Saha, Md Sahidullah et al. · 2024 · arXiv

In this report, we describe the speaker diarization (SD) and language diarization (LD) systems developed by our team for the Second DISPLACE Challenge, 2024. Our contributions were dedicated to Track 1 for SD and Track 2 for LD in multilingual and multi-speaker scenarios. We investigated different speech enhancement techniques, voice activity detection (VAD) techniques, unsupervised domain categorization, and neural embedding extraction architectures. We also exploited the fusion of various embedding extraction models. We implemented our system with the open-source SpeechBrain toolkit. Our fin

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Dynamics of Stochastic Momentum Methods on Large-scale, Quadratic Models

Courtney Paquette, Elliot Paquette · 2021 · arXiv

We analyze a class of stochastic gradient algorithms with momentum on a high-dimensional random least squares problem. Our framework, inspired by random matrix theory, provides an exact (deterministic) characterization for the sequence of loss values produced by these algorithms which is expressed only in terms of the eigenvalues of the Hessian. This leads to simple expressions for nearly-optimal hyperparameters, a description of the limiting neighborhood, and average-case complexity. As a consequence, we show that (small-batch) stochastic heavy-ball momentum with a fixed momentum parameter pr

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On the Design and Optimization of a Quantum Polynomial-Time Attack on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Donny Cheung, Dmitri Maslov, Jimson Mathew et al. · 2007 · arXiv

We consider a quantum polynomial-time algorithm which solves the discrete logarithm problem for points on elliptic curves over $GF(2^m)$. We improve over earlier algorithms by constructing an efficient circuit for multiplying elements of binary finite fields and by representing elliptic curve points using a technique based on projective coordinates. The depth of our proposed implementation, executable in the Linear Nearest Neighbor (LNN) architecture, is $O(m^2)$, which is an improvement over the previous bound of $O(m^3)$ derived assuming no architectural restrictions.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Beyond the RPA on the cheap: improved correlation energies with the efficient "Radial Exchange Hole" kernel

Tim Gould · 2012 · arXiv

The "ACFD-RPA" correlation energy functional has been widely applied to a variety of systems to successfully predict energy differences, and less successfully predict absolute correlation energies. Here we present a parameter-free exchange-correlation kernel that systematically improves absolute correlation energies, while maintaining most of the good numerical properties that make the ACFD-RPA numerically tractable. The "RXH" kernel is constructed to approximate the true exchange kernel via a carefully weighted, easily computable radial averaging. Correlation energy errors of atoms with two t

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Primordial $^4\text{He}$ constraints on inelastic macro dark matter revisited

David M. Jacobs, Gwyneth Allwright, Mpho Mafune et al. · 2015 · arXiv

At present, the best model for the evolution of the cosmos requires that dark matter make up approximately $25\%$ of the energy content of the Universe. Most approaches to explain the microscopic nature of dark matter, to date, have assumed its composition to be of intrinsically weakly interacting particles; however, this need not be the case to have consistency with all extant observations. Given decades of inconclusive evidence to support any dark matter candidate, there is strong motivation to consider alternatives to the standard particle scenario. One such example is macro dark matter, a

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On the impossibility of a quantum sieve algorithm for graph isomorphism: unconditional results

Cristopher Moore, Alexander Russell, Piotr Sniady · 2006 · arXiv

It is known that any quantum algorithm for Graph Isomorphism that works within the framework of the hidden subgroup problem (HSP) must perform highly entangled measurements across Ω(n \log n) coset states. One of the only known models for how such a measurement could be carried out efficiently is Kuperberg's algorithm for the HSP in the dihedral group, in which quantum states are adaptively combined and measured according to the decomposition of tensor products into irreducible representations. This ``quantum sieve'' starts with coset states, and works its way down towards representations whos

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On Ray Shooting for Triangles in 3-Space and Related Problems

Esther Ezra, Micha Sharir · 2021 · arXiv

We consider several problems that involve lines in three dimensions, and present improved algorithms for solving them. The problems include (i) ray shooting amid triangles in $R^3$, (ii) reporting intersections between query lines (segments, or rays) and input triangles, as well as approximately counting the number of such intersections, (iii) computing the intersection of two nonconvex polyhedra, (iv) detecting, counting, or reporting intersections in a set of lines in $R^3$, and (v) output-sensitive construction of an arrangement of triangles in three dimensions. Our approach is based on the

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Scaling Functions and Superscaling in Medium and Heavy Nuclei

A. N. Antonov, M. V. Ivanov, M. K. Gaidarov et al. · 2006 · arXiv

The scaling function $f(ψ')$ for medium and heavy nuclei with $Z\neq N$ for which the proton and neutron densities are not similar is constructed within the coherent density fluctuation model (CDFM) as a sum of the proton and neutron scaling functions. The latter are calculated in the cases of $^{62}$Ni, $^{82}$Kr, $^{118}$Sn, and $^{197}$Au nuclei on the basis of the corresponding proton and neutron density distributions which are obtained in deformed self-consistent mean-field Skyrme HF+BCS method. The results are in a reasonable agreement with the empirical data from the inclusive electron

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

How to Teach DNNs to Pay Attention to the Visual Modality in Speech Recognition

George Sterpu, Christian Saam, Naomi Harte · 2020 · arXiv

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) seeks to model, and thereby exploit, the dynamic relationship between a human voice and the corresponding mouth movements. A recently proposed multimodal fusion strategy, AV Align, based on state-of-the-art sequence to sequence neural networks, attempts to model this relationship by explicitly aligning the acoustic and visual representations of speech. This study investigates the inner workings of AV Align and visualises the audio-visual alignment patterns. Our experiments are performed on two of the largest publicly available AVSR datasets, TCD-TIMIT and

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

ArchAgent: Agentic AI-driven Computer Architecture Discovery

Raghav Gupta, Akanksha Jain, Abraham Gonzalez et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Agile hardware design flows are a critically needed force multiplier to meet the exploding demand for compute. Recently, agentic generative AI systems have demonstrated significant advances in algorithm design, improving code efficiency, and enabling discovery across scientific domains. Bridging these worlds, we present ArchAgent, an automated computer architecture discovery system built on AlphaEvolve. We show ArchAgent's ability to automatically design/implement state-of-the-art (SoTA) cache replacement policies (architecting new mechanisms/logic, not only changing parameters), broadly withi

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Fully Dynamic Algorithms for Minimum Weight Cycle and Related Problems

Adam Karczmarz · 2021 · arXiv

We consider the directed minimum weight cycle problem in the fully dynamic setting. To the best of our knowledge, so far no fully dynamic algorithms have been designed specifically for the minimum weight cycle problem in general digraphs. One can achieve $\tilde{O}(n^2)$ amortized update time by simply invoking the fully dynamic APSP algorithm of Demetrescu and Italiano [J. ACM'04]. This bound, however, yields no improvement over the trivial recompute-from-scratch algorithm for sparse graphs. Our first contribution is a very simple deterministic $(1+ε)$-approximate algorithm supporting vertex

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Learning Robust State Abstractions for Hidden-Parameter Block MDPs

Amy Zhang, Shagun Sodhani, Khimya Khetarpal et al. · 2020 · arXiv

Many control tasks exhibit similar dynamics that can be modeled as having common latent structure. Hidden-Parameter Markov Decision Processes (HiP-MDPs) explicitly model this structure to improve sample efficiency in multi-task settings. However, this setting makes strong assumptions on the observability of the state that limit its application in real-world scenarios with rich observation spaces. In this work, we leverage ideas of common structure from the HiP-MDP setting, and extend it to enable robust state abstractions inspired by Block MDPs. We derive instantiations of this new framework f

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Markov-modulated on/off processes for long-range dependent internet traffic

Richard G. Clegg · 2006 · arXiv

The aim of this paper is to use a very simple queuing model to compare a number of models from the literature which have been used to replicate the statistical nature of internet traffic and, in particular, the long-range dependence of this traffic. The four models all have the form of discrete time Markov-modulated processes (two other models are introduced for comparison purposes). While it is often stated that long-range dependence has a critical effect on queuing performance, it appears that the models used here do not well replicated the queuing performance of real internet traffic. In pa