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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.

21309 results · page 393 of 711

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

NLP Techniques for Water Quality Analysis in Social Media Content

Muhammad Asif Ayub, Khubaib Ahmad, Kashif Ahmad et al. · 2021 · arXiv

This paper presents our contributions to the MediaEval 2021 task namely "WaterMM: Water Quality in Social Multimedia". The task aims at analyzing social media posts relevant to water quality with particular focus on the aspects like watercolor, smell, taste, and related illnesses. To this aim, a multimodal dataset containing both textual and visual information along with meta-data is provided. Considering the quality and quantity of available content, we mainly focus on textual information by employing three different models individually and jointly in a late-fusion manner. These models includ

Abandoned HypothesisOpen accessPhysics

Modelling the Astronomical Silicate Features: I. On the Spectrum Subtraction Method

Aigen Li, J. Mayo Greenberg, Gang Zhao · 2002 · arXiv

The {\it assumption of additive absorptivity} by different components in compound particles is a widely used method applied in the literature to the analysis of the chemical and structural properties of astronomical (circumstellar, interstellar, protostellar, and cometary) silicates as well as other materials. The errors intrinsic in this additivity assumption, which, in application to astronomical spectra, amounts in some case to {\it spectrum subtraction} have not always been adequately considered in previous works on silicate mineralogy. The failings in the ``{\it spectrum subtraction metho

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Diving Deep into Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation

Jingjing Huo, Christian Herold, Yingbo Gao et al. · 2020 · arXiv

Context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) is a promising direction to improve the translation quality by making use of the additional context, e.g., document-level translation, or having meta-information. Although there exist various architectures and analyses, the effectiveness of different context-aware NMT models is not well explored yet. This paper analyzes the performance of document-level NMT models on four diverse domains with a varied amount of parallel document-level bilingual data. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments to investigate the impact of document-level NMT. We

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Doping and Defect-Induced Germanene: A Superior Media for Sensing H2S, SO2, and CO2 gas molecules

Md Monirojjaman Monshi, Sadegh Mehdi Aghaei, Irene Calizo · 2017 · arXiv

First-principles calculations based on density functional theory (DFT) have been employed to investigate the structural, electronic, and gas-sensing properties of pure, defected, and doped germanene nanosheets. Our calculations have revealed that while a pristine germanene nanosheet adsorbs CO2 weakly, H2S moderately, and SO2 strongly, the introduction of vacancy defects increases the sensitivity significantly which is promising for future gas-sensing applications.Mulliken population analysis imparts that an appreciable amount of charge transfer occurs between gas molecules and a germanene nan

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Oligopeptides' frequencies in the classification of proteins' primary structures

P. Sirabella, A. Giuliani, A. Colosimo · 1998 · arXiv

This paper reports about an approach to the classification of proteins' primary structures taking advantage of the Self Organizing Maps algorithm and of a numerical coding of the aminoacids based upon their physico-chemical properties. Hydrophobicity, volume, surface area, hydrophilicity, bulkiness, refractivity and polarity were subjected to a Principal Component Analysis and the first two principal components, explaining 84.8 % of the total observed variability, were used to cluster the aminoacids into 4 or 5 classes through a k-means algorithm. This leads to an economical representation of

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Reconstructing the cosmic Horseshoe gravitational lens using the singular perturbative approach

C. Alard · 2016 · arXiv

The cosmic horseshoe gravitational lens is analyzed using the perturbative approach. The two first order perturbative fields are expanded in Fourier series. The source is reconstructed using a fine adaptive grid. The expansion of the fields at order 2 produces a higher value of the chi-square. Expanding at order 3 provides a very significant improvement, while order 4 does not bring a significant improvement over order 3. The presence of the order 3 terms is not a consequence of limiting the perturbative expansion to the first order. The amplitude and signs of the third order terms are recover

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

RECAP: Regression Evaluation for Continual Adaptation of Prompts

Harsh Deshpande, Kushal Chawla, Sangwoo Cho et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Production agentic systems routinely face evolving constraints and must comply from the very next interaction. Scenarios like a tool-call notification changing a compliance threshold or a policy update adding disclosure requirements fit this criteria, having close to no room for errors in production. This proactive adaptation setting is common in deployment, but absent from current benchmarks, which assume either static constraint sets or reactive protocols with evaluation feedback. We introduce RECAP, a benchmark that measures continual-learning phenomena (forgetting, regression, forward tran

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

An Eye on Clinical BERT: Investigating Language Model Generalization for Diabetic Eye Disease Phenotyping

Keith Harrigian, Tina Tang, Anthony Gonzales et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Diabetic eye disease is a major cause of blindness worldwide. The ability to monitor relevant clinical trajectories and detect lapses in care is critical to managing the disease and preventing blindness. Alas, much of the information necessary to support these goals is found only in the free text of the electronic medical record. To fill this information gap, we introduce a system for extracting evidence from clinical text of 19 clinical concepts related to diabetic eye disease and inferring relevant attributes for each. In developing this ophthalmology phenotyping system, we are also afforded

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Acceleration of particles and shells by Reissner-Nordström naked singularities

Mandar Patil, Pankaj S. Joshi, Masashi Kimura et al. · 2011 · arXiv

We explore the Reissner-Nordström naked singularities with a charge $Q$ larger than its mass $M$ from the perspective of the particle acceleration. We first consider a collision between two test particles following the radial geodesics in the Reissner-Nordström naked singular geometry. An initially radially ingoing particle turns back due to the repulsive effect of gravity in the vicinity of naked singularity. Such a particle then collides with an another radially ingoing particle. We show that the center of mass energy of collision taking place at $r \approx M$ is unbound, in the limit where

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Metabook: A Mobile-to-Headset Pipeline for 3D Story Book Creation in Augmented Reality

Yibo Wang, Yuanyuan Mao, Lik-Hang Lee et al. · 2024 · arXiv

The AR 3D book has shown significant potential in enhancing students' learning outcomes. However, the creation process of 3D books requires a significant investment of time, effort, and specialized skills. Thus, in this paper, we first conduct a three-day workshop investigating how AI can support the automated creation of 3D books. Informed by the design insights derived from the workshop, we developed Metabook, a system that enables even novice users to create 3D books from text automatically. To our knowledge, Metabook is the first system to offer end-to-end 3D book generation. A follow-up s

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

EdgeFlow: Edge-Map Augmented VLM-Based Flowchart Processing for Industrial Requirements Engineering

Zhifei Dou, Shabnam Hassani, Ou Wei · 2026 · arXiv

Flowcharts are widely used in industrial requirements, but usually remain embedded as static images. Vision Language Models (VLMs) show promise in the conversion of these flowcharts into machine-readable models for RE activities, yet, when directly applied to flowchart conversion, they often fail on topology-critical visual details. To address this, we propose EdgeFlow that augments a VLM's original input with a deterministically extracted Canny edge map-acting as a structural prior-to improve flowchart-to-Mermaid conversion, without requiring annotated training data or domain-specific model f

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Measuring the Effect of Discourse Relations on Blog Summarization

Shamima Mithun, Leila Kosseim · 2017 · arXiv

The work presented in this paper attempts to evaluate and quantify the use of discourse relations in the context of blog summarization and compare their use to more traditional and factual texts. Specifically, we measured the usefulness of 6 discourse relations - namely comparison, contingency, illustration, attribution, topic-opinion, and attributive for the task of text summarization from blogs. We have evaluated the effect of each relation using the TAC 2008 opinion summarization dataset and compared them with the results with the DUC 2007 dataset. The results show that in both textual genr

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Tagset Reduction Without Information Loss

Thorsten Brants · 1995 · arXiv

A technique for reducing a tagset used for n-gram part-of-speech disambiguation is introduced and evaluated in an experiment. The technique ensures that all information that is provided by the original tagset can be restored from the reduced one. This is crucial, since we are interested in the linguistically motivated tags for part-of-speech disambiguation. The reduced tagset needs fewer parameters for its statistical model and allows more accurate parameter estimation. Additionally, there is a slight but not significant improvement of tagging accuracy.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Reliability and User-Plane Latency Analysis of mmWave Massive MIMO for Grant-Free URLLC Applications

Joao V. C. Evangelista, Georges Kaddoum, Zeeshan Sattar · 2021 · arXiv

5G cellular networks are designed to support a new range of applications not supported by previous standards. Among these, ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) applications are arguably the most challenging. URLLC service requires the user equipment (UE) to be able to transmit its data under strict latency constraints with high reliability. To address these requirements, new technologies, such as mini-slots, semi-persistent scheduling and grant-free access were introduced in 5G standards. In this work, we formulate a spatiotemporal mathematical model to evaluate the user-plane late

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Intersecting non-SUSY branes and closed string tachyon condensation

J. X. Lu, Shibaji Roy, Zhao-Long Wang et al. · 2007 · arXiv

Following \cite{Bai:2006vv} we here consider the supergravity solutions representing the charged non-supersymmetric $p$-brane (for $1\leq p \leq 6$) intersecting with chargeless non-supersymmetric 1-brane and 0-brane of type II string theories. We show how these solutions nicely interpolate between black $p$-branes and the Kaluza-Klein "bubble of nothing" (BON) by continuously varying some parameters characterizing the solutions from one set of values to another. By performing a time symmetric general bubble initial data analysis, we show that the interpolation implies a possible transition fr

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Refraction efficiency of Huygens' and bianisotropic terahertz metasurfaces

Michael A. Cole, Aristeidis Lamprianidis, Ilya V. Shadrivov et al. · 2018 · arXiv

Metasurfaces are an enabling technology for complex wave manipulation functions, including in the terahertz frequency range, where they are expected to advance security, imaging, sensing, and communications technology. For operation in transmission, Huygens' metasurfaces are commonly used, since their good impedance match to the surrounding media minimizes reflections and maximizes transmission. Recent theoretical work has shown that Huygens' metasurfaces are non-optimal, particularly for large angles of refraction, and that to eliminate reflections and spurious diffracted beams it is necessar

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Parallelizing Explicit and Implicit Extrapolation Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations

Utkarsh, Chris Elrod, Yingbo Ma et al. · 2022 · arXiv

Numerically solving ordinary differential equations (ODEs) is a naturally serial process and as a result the vast majority of ODE solver software are serial. In this manuscript we developed a set of parallelized ODE solvers using extrapolation methods which exploit "parallelism within the method" so that arbitrary user ODEs can be parallelized. We describe the specific choices made in the implementation of the explicit and implicit extrapolation methods which allow for generating low overhead static schedules to then exploit with optimized multi-threaded implementations. We demonstrate that wh

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Does The Addition of a Duration Improve the L_iso - E_peak Relation For Gamma-Ray Bursts?

Andrew C. Collazzi, Bradley E. Schaefer · 2008 · arXiv

Firmani et al. proposed a new Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) luminosity relation that showed a significant improvement over the L_iso-E_peak relation. The new proposed relation simply modifies the E_peak value by multiplying it by a power of T_0.45, where T_0.45 is a particular measure of the GRB duration. We begin by reproducing the results of Firmani for his 19 bursts. We then test the Firmani relation for the same 19 bursts except that we use independently measured values for L_iso, T_0.45, and E_peak, and we find that the relation deteriorates substantially. We further test the relation by using 60

Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Nearly ETH-Tight Algorithms for Planar Steiner Tree with Terminals on Few Faces

Sándor Kisfaludi-Bak, Jesper Nederlof, Erik Jan van Leeuwen · 2018 · arXiv

The Planar Steiner Tree problem is one of the most fundamental NP-complete problems as it models many network design problems. Recall that an instance of this problem consists of a graph with edge weights, and a subset of vertices (often called terminals); the goal is to find a subtree of the graph of minimum total weight that connects all terminals. A seminal paper by Erickson et al. [Math. Oper. Res., 1987] considers instances where the underlying graph is planar and all terminals can be covered by the boundary of $k$ faces. Erickson et al. show that the problem can be solved by an algorithm

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Assessing Vibrational Frequencies of CO Adsorbed on Cerium Oxide Surfaces Using SCAN and r2SCAN Functionals

Alexander Contreras-Payares, Pablo G. Lustemberg, M. Verónica Ganduglia-Pirovano · 2025 · arXiv

The vibrational frequency of carbon monoxide (CO) adsorbed on ceria-based catalysts serves as a sensitive probe for identifying exposed surface facets, provided that experimental reference data on well-defined single-crystal surfaces and reliable theoretical assignments are available. Previous studies have shown that the hybrid DFT approach using the HSE06 functional yields good agreement with experimental observations, whereas the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) with PBE+U does not. In this work, we assess the performance of different exchange-correlation functionals by comparing the

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Hidden Meanings in Plain Sight: RebusBench for Evaluating Cognitive Visual Reasoning

Seyed Amir Kasaei, Arash Marioriyad, Mahbod Khaleti et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable proficiency in explicit visual recognition, effectively describing what is directly visible in an image. However, a critical cognitive gap emerges when the visual input serves only as a clue rather than the answer. We identify that current models struggle with the complex, multi-step reasoning required to solve problems where information is not explicitly depicted. Successfully solving a rebus puzzle requires a distinct cognitive workflow: the model must extract visual and textual attributes, retrieve linguistic prior knowledge (suc

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Spin-statistics relation for quantum Hall states

Alberto Nardin, Eddy Ardonne, Leonardo Mazza · 2022 · arXiv

We prove a generic spin-statistics relation for the fractional quasiparticles that appear in abelian quantum Hall states on the disk. The proof is based on an efficient way for computing the Berry phase acquired by a generic quasiparticle translated in the plane along a circular path, and on the crucial fact that once the gauge-invariant generator of rotations is projected onto a Landau level, it fractionalizes among the quasiparticles and the edge. Using these results we define a measurable quasiparticle fractional spin that satisfies the spin-statistics relation. As an application, we predic

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

When Medical Imaging Met Self-Attention: A Love Story That Didn't Quite Work Out

Tristan Piater, Niklas Penzel, Gideon Stein et al. · 2024 · arXiv

A substantial body of research has focused on developing systems that assist medical professionals during labor-intensive early screening processes, many based on convolutional deep-learning architectures. Recently, multiple studies explored the application of so-called self-attention mechanisms in the vision domain. These studies often report empirical improvements over fully convolutional approaches on various datasets and tasks. To evaluate this trend for medical imaging, we extend two widely adopted convolutional architectures with different self-attention variants on two different medical

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Benchmarking Language Model Creativity: A Case Study on Code Generation

Yining Lu, Dixuan Wang, Tianjian Li et al. · 2024 · arXiv

As LLMs become increasingly prevalent, it is interesting to consider how ``creative'' these models can be. From cognitive science, creativity consists of at least two key characteristics: \emph{convergent} thinking (purposefulness to achieve a given goal) and \emph{divergent} thinking (adaptability to explore new environments or constraints) \citep{runco2003critical}. In this work, we introduce a framework for quantifying LLM creativity that incorporates the two design ingredients: (1) We introduce DENIAL PROMPTING which pushes LLMs to develop more creative solutions to a given problem by incr

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Association Is Not Similarity: Learning Corpus-Specific Associations for Multi-Hop Retrieval

Jason Dury · 2026 · arXiv

Dense retrieval systems rank passages by embedding similarity to a query, but multi-hop questions require passages that are associatively related through shared reasoning chains. We introduce Association-Augmented Retrieval (AAR), a lightweight transductive reranking method that trains a small MLP (4.2M parameters) to learn associative relationships between passages in embedding space using contrastive learning on co-occurrence annotations. At inference time, AAR reranks an initial dense retrieval candidate set using bi-directional association scoring. On HotpotQA, AAR improves passage Recall@

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

When Do Intrinsic Rewards Work for Code Reasoning? A Comprehensive Study

Xiaolong Jin, Xuandong Zhao, Wenbo Guo et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in large language model reasoning, but relies on ground-truth supervision that is costly or infeasible, especially in coding tasks. Recent work addresses this by deriving rewards from a model's own signals, such as majority voting or confidence-based scores, achieving notable success on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. However, code generation poses distinct challenges: programs are structurally complex, semantically equivalent solutions may differ syntactically, and verification typically requires executio

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Characters of p'-degree and Thompson's character degree theorem

Nguyen Ngoc Hung · 2015 · arXiv

A classical theorem of John Thompson on character degrees asserts that if the degree of every ordinary irreducible character of a finite group $G$ is 1 or divisible by a prime $p$, then $G$ has a normal $p$-complement. We obtain a significant improvement of this result by considering the average of $p'$-degrees of irreducible characters. We also consider fields of character values and prove several improvements of earlier related results.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

Impact of data for forecasting on performance of model predictive control in buildings with smart energy storage

Max Langtry, Vijja Wichitwechkarn, Rebecca Ward et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Data is required to develop forecasting models for use in Model Predictive Control (MPC) schemes in building energy systems. However, data is costly to both collect and exploit. Determining cost optimal data usage strategies requires understanding of the forecast accuracy and resulting MPC operational performance it enables. This study investigates the performance of both simple and state-of-the-art machine learning prediction models for MPC in multi-building energy systems using a simulated case study with historic building energy data. The impact on forecast accuracy of measures to improve m

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Significant Improvements over the State of the Art? A Case Study of the MS MARCO Document Ranking Leaderboard

Jimmy Lin, Daniel Campos, Nick Craswell et al. · 2021 · arXiv

Leaderboards are a ubiquitous part of modern research in applied machine learning. By design, they sort entries into some linear order, where the top-scoring entry is recognized as the "state of the art" (SOTA). Due to the rapid progress being made in information retrieval today, particularly with neural models, the top entry in a leaderboard is replaced with some regularity. These are touted as improvements in the state of the art. Such pronouncements, however, are almost never qualified with significance testing. In the context of the MS MARCO document ranking leaderboard, we pose a specific

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Compensator-based small animal IMRT enables conformal preclinical dose painting: application to tumor hypoxia

Jordan M. Slagowski, Erik Pearson, Rajit Tummala et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Techniques for preclinical intensity modulated radiation therapy are being developed to improve translation by replicating the clinical paradigm. This study presents the first treatment planning comparison between small animal IMRT (SA-IMRT) and three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (CRT) in a model application, oxygen-guided dose painting of tumor hypoxia, using actual mouse data. A novel compensator-based platform was employed to generate SA-IMRT and CRT plans with 2-15 beam angles for seventeen mice with fibrosarcoma tumors. The whole tumor received a dose of 22.5 Gy, with a simultaneous