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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.

1761 results in Negative / Null Result Report for "Mpro" · page 45 of 59

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Somatic in the East, Psychological in the West?: Investigating Clinically-Grounded Cross-Cultural Depression Symptom Expression in LLMs

Shintaro Sakai, Jisun An, Migyeong Kang et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Prior clinical psychology research shows that Western individuals with depression tend to report psychological symptoms, while Eastern individuals report somatic ones. We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs), which are increasingly used in mental health, reproduce these cultural patterns by prompting them with Western or Eastern personas. Results show that LLMs largely fail to replicate the patterns when prompted in English, though prompting in major Eastern languages (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi) improves alignment in several configurations. Our analysis pinpoints two key reasons

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards reproducible machine learning-based process monitoring and quality prediction research for additive manufacturing

Jiarui Xie, Mutahar Safdar, Andrei Mircea et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Machine learning (ML)-based cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have been extensively developed to improve the print quality of additive manufacturing (AM). However, the reproducibility of these systems, as presented in published research, has not been thoroughly investigated due to a lack of formal evaluation methods. Reproducibility, a critical component of trustworthy artificial intelligence, is achieved when an independent team can replicate the findings or artifacts of a study using a different experimental setup and achieve comparable performance. In many publications, critical information nec

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Towards the Use of Neural Networks for Influenza Prediction at Multiple Spatial Resolutions

Emily L. Aiken, Andre T. Nguyen, Mauricio Santillana · 2019 · arXiv

We introduce the use of a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for influenza prediction at the state- and city-level in the US, and experiment with the inclusion of real-time flu-related Internet search data. We find that a GRU has lower prediction error than current state-of-the-art methods for data-driven influenza prediction at time horizons of over two weeks. In contrast with other machine learning approaches, the inclusion of real-time Internet search data does not improve GRU predictions.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Use of Time Dependent Data in Bayesian Global 21cm Foreground and Signal Modelling

Dominic Anstey, Eloy de Lera Acedo, Will Handley · 2022 · arXiv

Global 21cm cosmology aims to investigate the cosmic dawn and epoch of reionisation by measuring the sky averaged HI absorption signal, which requires, accurate modelling of, or correction for, the bright radio foregrounds and distortions arising from chromaticity of the antenna beam. We investigate the effect of improving foreground modelling by fitting data sets from many observation times simultaneously in a single Bayesian analysis, fitting for the same parameter set by performing these fits on simulated data. We find that for a hexagonal dipole antenna, this simultaneous fitting produces

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Significant improvement in planetary system simulations from statistical averaging

David M. Hernandez, Eric Agol, Matthew J. Holman et al. · 2021 · arXiv

Symplectic integrators are widely used for the study of planetary dynamics and other $N$-body problems. In a study of the outer Solar system, we demonstrate that individual symplectic integrations can yield biased errors in the semi-major axes and possibly other orbital elements. The bias is resolved by studying an ensemble of initial conditions of the outer Solar system. Such statistical sampling could significantly improve measurement of planetary system properties like their secular frequencies. We also compared the distributions of action-like variables between high and low accuracy integr

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

YARARA: Significant improvement of RV precision through post-processing of spectral time-series

M. Cretignier, X. Dumusque, N. C. Hara et al. · 2021 · arXiv

Aims: Even the most-precise radial-velocity instruments gather high-resolution spectra that present systematic errors that a data reduction pipeline cannot identify and correct for efficiently. In this paper, we aim at improving the radial-velocity precision of HARPS measurements by cleaning individual extracted spectra using the wealth of information contained in spectra time-series. Methods: We developed YARARA, a post-processing pipeline designed to clean high-resolution spectra from instrumental systematics and atmospheric contamination. Spectra are corrected for: tellurics, interference p

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Bias reduction of peer influence effects with latent coordinates and community membership

Daniel Rajchwald, Natasha Markuzon · 2016 · arXiv

The importance of peer influence on consumer actions plays a vital role in marketing efforts. However, peer influence effects are often confounded with latent homophily, which are unobserved commonalities that drive friendship. Understanding causality has become one of the pressing issues of current research. We present an approach to explicitly account for various causal influences. We implement a simulation framework to show the effectiveness of two latent homophily proxies, latent coordinates and community membership, in improving peer influence effect estimates on game downloads in a Japan

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

A Determination of H_0 with the CLASS Gravitational Lens B1608+656: III. A Significant Improvement in the Precision of the Time Delay Measurements

C. D. Fassnacht, E. Xanthopoulos, L. V. E. Koopmans et al. · 2002 · arXiv

The gravitational lens CLASS B1608+656 is the only four-image lens system for which all three independent time delays have been measured. This makes the system an excellent candidate for a high-quality determination of H_0 at cosmological distances. However, the original measurements of the time delays had large (12-20%) uncertainties, due to the low level of variability of the background source during the monitoring campaign. In this paper, we present results from two additional VLA monitoring campaigns. In contrast to the ~5% variations seen during the first season of monitoring, the source

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

C,T1,T2: A complementary method to detect Multiple Populations with the Washington filter system

Heinz Frelijj, Douglas geisler, Sandro Villanova et al. · 2022 · arXiv

In this research we test the ability of a three Washington filter combination, (C-T1)-(T1-T2), compared with that of the traditional C-T1 color to find multiple populations on two globular clusters: NGC 7099 and NGC 1851, types I and II Globular clusters, respectively. Our improved photometry and membership selection, now using Gaia proper motions, finds that the second population stars are more centrally concentrated than first population stars, as expected and contrary to our previous findings for NGC 7099. We find that multiple populations are more easily detected in both clusters using the

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

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

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

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 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

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

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 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

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Cowen's class and Thomson's class

Kunyu Guo, Hansong Huang · 2013 · arXiv

In studying commutants of analytic Toeplitz operators, Thomson proved a remarkable theorem which states that under a mild condition, the commutant of an analytic Toeplitz operator is equal to that of Toeplitz operator defined by a finite Blaschke product. Cowen gave an significant improvement of Thosom's result. In this paper, we will present examples in Cowen's class which does not lie in Thomson's class.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

From Co-Design to Metacognitive Laziness: Evaluating Generative AI in Vocational Education

Amir Yunus, Peng Rend Gay, Oon Teng Lee · 2025 · arXiv

This study examines the development and deployment of a Generative AI proof-of-concept (POC) designed to support lecturers in a vocational education setting in Singapore. Employing a user-centred, mixed-methods design process, we co-developed an AI chatbot with lecturers to address recurring instructional challenges during exam preparation, specifically managing repetitive questions and scaling feedback delivery. The POC achieved its primary operational goals: lecturers reported streamlined workflows, reduced cognitive load, and observed improved student confidence in navigating course content

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Testing operational phase concepts in quantum optics

J. Rehacek, Z. Hradil, M. Dusek et al. · 1999 · arXiv

An experimental comparison of several operational phase concepts is presented. In particular, it is shown that statistically motivated evaluation of experimental data may lead to a significant improvement in phase fitting upon the conventional Noh, Fouge'res and Mandel procedure. The analysis is extended to the asymptotic limit of large intensities, where a strong evidence in favor of multi--dimensional estimation procedures has been found.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Time-aware Self-Attention Meets Logic Reasoning in Recommender Systems

Zhijian Luo, Zihan Huang, Jiahui Tang et al. · 2022 · arXiv

At the age of big data, recommender systems have shown remarkable success as a key means of information filtering in our daily life. Recent years have witnessed the technical development of recommender systems, from perception learning to cognition reasoning which intuitively build the task of recommendation as the procedure of logical reasoning and have achieve significant improvement. However, the logical statement in reasoning implicitly admits irrelevance of ordering, even does not consider time information which plays an important role in many recommendation tasks. Furthermore, recommenda

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Teleportation of Hybrid Entangled States with Continuous-Variable Entanglement

Mingjian He, Robert Malaney · 2022 · arXiv

Hybrid entanglement between discrete-variable (DV) and continuous-variable (CV) quantum systems is an essential resource for heterogeneous quantum networks. Our previous work showed that in lossy channels the teleportation of DV qubits, via CV-entangled states, can be significantly improved by a new protocol defined by a modified Bell state measurement at the sender. This work explores whether a new, similarly modified, CV-based teleportation protocol can lead to improvement in the transfer of hybrid entangled states. To set the scene, we first determine the performance of such a modified prot

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Effect of top quark spin on the unparticle couplings in γγ\to t\bar{t}

I. Sahin · 2008 · arXiv

We investigate the potential of $γγ$ collisions to probe scalar unparticle couplings via top-antitop quark pair production. We find 95% confidence level limits on the unparticle couplings with an integrated luminosity of $500 fb^{-1}$ and $\sqrt{s}=1$ TeV energy. We investigate the effect of top quark spin polarization on the unparticle couplings. It is shown that spin polarization of the top quark leads to a significant improvement in the sensitivity limits.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Improved effective vertices in the multi-orbital Two-Particle Self-Consistent method from Dynamical Mean-Field Theory

Karim Zantout, Steffen Backes, Aleksandar Razpopov et al. · 2022 · arXiv

In this work we present a multi-orbital form of the Two-Particle Self-Consistent approach (TPSC), here the effective local and static irreducible interaction vertices are determined by means of the Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT). This approach replaces the approximate ansatz equations for the double occupations $\langle n^{}_{α,σ}n^{}_{β,σ'}\rangle$ by sampling them directly for the same model using DMFT. Compared to the usual Hartree-Fock like ansatz, this leads to more accurate local vertices in the weakly correlated regime, and provides access to stronger correlated systems that were pr

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Excited Fermion Contribution to Z Physics at One Loop

M. C. Gonzalez-Garcia, S. F. Novaes · 1996 · arXiv

We investigate the effects induced by excited leptons at the one-loop level in the observables measured on the $Z$ peak at LEP. Using a general effective Lagrangian approach to describe the couplings of the excited leptons, we compute their contributions to both oblique parameters and $Z$ partial widths. Our results show that the new effects are comparable to the present experimental sensitivity, but they do not lead to a significant improvement on the available constraints on the couplings and masses of these states.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Neural document expansion for ad-hoc information retrieval

Cheng Tang, Andrew Arnold · 2020 · arXiv

Recently, Nogueira et al. [2019] proposed a new approach to document expansion based on a neural Seq2Seq model, showing significant improvement on short text retrieval task. However, this approach needs a large amount of in-domain training data. In this paper, we show that this neural document expansion approach can be effectively adapted to standard IR tasks, where labels are scarce and many long documents are present.