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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.

19878 results in Negative / Null Result Report · page 463 of 663

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Adaptive elliptical aperture photometry: a software package for high-cadence ground-based photometry. I. Application to rapid oscillators observed from SAAO

Dominic M. Bowman, Daniel L. Holdsworth · 2019 · arXiv

Context. Modern space telescopes are currently providing high-precision light curves for a large fraction of the sky, such that many new variable stars are being discovered. However, some stars have periodic variability with periods of order minutes and require high-cadence photometry to probe the physical mechanisms responsible. A cadence of less than a minute is often required to remove Nyquist ambiguities and confirm rapid variability which forces observers to obtain high-cadence ground-based photometry. Aims. We aim to provide a modern software package to reduce ground-based photometric ti

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Sanctions and Imports of Essential Goods: A Closer Look at the Equipo Anova (2021) Results

Francisco Rodríguez · 2022 · arXiv

We revisit the results of a recent paper by Equipo Anova, who claim to find evidence of an improvement in Venezuelan imports of food and medicines associated with the adoption of U.S. financial sanctions towards Venezuela in 2017. We show that their results are consequence of data coding errors and questionable methodological choices, including the use an unreasonable functional form that implies a counterfactual of negative imports in the absence of sanctions, the omission of data accounting for four-fifths of the country's food imports at the time of sanctions and incorrect application of re

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Large scale flows in the solar interior: Effect of asymmetry in peak profiles

Sarbani Basu, H. M. Antia · 1999 · arXiv

Ring diagram analysis can be used to study large scale velocity fields in the outer part of the solar convection zone. All previous works assume that the peak profiles in the solar oscillation power spectrum are symmetric. However, it has now been demonstrated that the peaks are not symmetric. In this work we study how the explicit use of asymmetric peak profiles in ring-diagram analysis influences the estimated velocity fields. We find that the use of asymmetric profiles leads to significant improvement in the fits, but the estimated velocity fields are not substantially different from those

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Transiting Exoplanet Monitoring Project (TEMP). VI. The Homogeneous Refinement of System Parameters for 39 Transiting Hot Jupiters with 127 New Light Curves

Xian-Yu Wang, Yong-Hao Wang, Songhu Wang et al. · 2021 · arXiv

We present 127 new transit light curves for 39 hot Jupiter systems, obtained over the span of five years by two ground-based telescopes. A homogeneous analysis of these newly collected light curves together with archived spectroscopic, photometric, and Doppler velocimetric data using EXOFASTv2 leads to a significant improvement in the physical and orbital parameters of each system. All of our stellar radii are constrained to accuracies of better than 3\%. The planetary radii for 37 of our 39 targets are determined to accuracies of better than $5\%$. Compared to our results, the literature ecce

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Hadronic Contribution to (g-2)_{mu}

Andreas Hocker · 2001 · arXiv

The recent precise measurement of the muon magnetic anomaly (g-2)_{mu} at BNL opens a window into possible new physics, provided the contribution from hadronic vacuum polarization is well understood. This talk summarizes the development in the evaluation of the leading order hadronic contributions. Significant improvement has been achieved in a series of analyses which is presented historically in three steps: (1), use of tau spectral functions in addition to e+e- cross sections, (2), extended use of perturbative QCD and (3), application of QCD sum rule techniques. The uncertainties, in partic

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Trading Inference-Time Compute for Adversarial Robustness

Wojciech Zaremba, Evgenia Nitishinskaya, Boaz Barak et al. · 2025 · arXiv

We conduct experiments on the impact of increasing inference-time compute in reasoning models (specifically OpenAI o1-preview and o1-mini) on their robustness to adversarial attacks. We find that across a variety of attacks, increased inference-time compute leads to improved robustness. In many cases (with important exceptions), the fraction of model samples where the attack succeeds tends to zero as the amount of test-time compute grows. We perform no adversarial training for the tasks we study, and we increase inference-time compute by simply allowing the models to spend more compute on reas

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

From energy bounds to dimensional estimates in a branched transport model for type-I superconductors

Guido De Philippis, Michael Goldman, Berardo Ruffini · 2023 · arXiv

We consider a branched transport type problem which describes the magnetic flux through type-I superconductors in a regime of very weak applied fields. At the boundary of the sample, deviation of the magnetization from being uniform is penalized through a negative Sobolev norm. It was conjectured by S. Conti, F. Otto and S. Serfaty that as a result, the trace of the magnetization on the boundary should be a measure of Hausdorff dimension $8/5$. We prove that this conjecture is equivalent to the proof of local energy bounds with an optimal exponent. We then obtain local bounds which are however

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 accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Conditioning on a Volatility Proxy Compresses the Apparent Timescale of Collective Market Correlation

Yuda Bi, Vince D Calhoun · 2026 · arXiv

We address the attribution problem for apparent slow collective dynamics: is the observed persistence intrinsic, or inherited from a persistent driver? For the leading eigenvalue fraction $ψ_1=λ_{\max}/N$ of S\&P 500 60-day rolling correlation matrices ($237$ stocks, 2004--2023), a VIX-coupled Ornstein--Uhlenbeck model reduces the effective relaxation time from $298$ to $61$ trading days and improves the fit over bare mean reversion by $Δ$BIC$=109$. On the decomposition sample, an informational residual of $\log(\mathrm{VIX})$ alone retains most of that gain ($Δ$BIC$=78.6$), whereas a mechanic

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

From Hallucination to Structure Snowballing: The Alignment Tax of Constrained Decoding in LLM Reflection

Hongxu Zhou · 2026 · arXiv

Intrinsic self-correction in Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently fails in open-ended reasoning tasks due to ``hallucination snowballing,'' a phenomenon in which models recursively justify early errors during free-text reflection. While structured feedback can mitigate this issue, existing approaches often rely on externally trained critics or symbolic tools, reducing agent autonomy. This study investigates whether enforcing structured reflection purely through Outlines-based constrained decoding can disrupt error propagation without additional training. Evaluating an 8-billion-parameter mo

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Geometry Effects in Switching of Nanomagnets with Strain: Reliability, Energy Dissipation and Clock Speed in Dipole-Coupled Nanomagnetic Logic

Md Mamun Al-Rashid, Jayasimha Atulasimha, Supriyo Bandyopadhyay · 2014 · arXiv

Strain-clocked dipole-coupled nanomagnetic logic is an energy-efficient Boolean logic paradigm whose progress has been stymied by its propensity for high error rates. In an effort to mitigate this problem, we have studied the effect of nanomagnet geometry on error rates, focusing on elliptical and cylindrical geometries. We had previously reported that the out-of-plane excursion of the magnetization vector during switching creates a precessional torque that is responsible for high switching error probability in elliptical nanomagnet geometries. The absence of this torque in cylindrical magnets

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Durkheim Project Data Analysis Report

Linas Vepstas · 2013 · arXiv

This report describes the suicidality prediction models created under the DARPA DCAPS program in association with the Durkheim Project [http://durkheimproject.org/]. The models were built primarily from unstructured text (free-format clinician notes) for several hundred patient records obtained from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). The models were constructed using a genetic programming algorithm applied to bag-of-words and bag-of-phrases datasets. The influence of additional structured data was explored but was found to be minor. Given the small dataset size, classification between c

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Good Data, Large Data, or No Data? Comparing Three Approaches in Developing Research Aspect Classifiers for Biomedical Papers

Shreya Chandrasekhar, Chieh-Yang Huang, Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang · 2023 · arXiv

The rapid growth of scientific publications, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizes the need for tools to help researchers efficiently comprehend the latest advancements. One essential part of understanding scientific literature is research aspect classification, which categorizes sentences in abstracts to Background, Purpose, Method, and Finding. In this study, we investigate the impact of different datasets on model performance for the crowd-annotated CODA-19 research aspect classification task. Specifically, we explore the potential benefits of using the large, automatically

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Data filtering methods for training language models

Egor Shevchenko, Elena Bruches · 2026 · arXiv

Data quality is a critical factor in the effectiveness of machine learning models. Label errors, present even in widely used benchmarks, introduce noise into training data and reduce model generalization. In this work, we conduct a comparative analysis of two automatic label error detection methods - Confident Learning and Dataset Cartography - on three Russian text classification corpora of varying size, number of classes, and domain: ru_emotion_e-culture (49,123 examples, emotion classification), RuCoLA (8,524 examples, linguistic acceptability), and TERRa (2,337 examples, textual entailment

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Cation mono- and co-doped anatase TiO$_2$ nanotubes: An {\em ab initio} investigation of electronic and optical properties

Mohamed M. Fadlallah, Ulrich Eckern · 2017 · arXiv

The structural, electronic, and optical properties of metal (Si, Ge, Sn, and Pb) mono- and co-doped anatase TiO$_{2}$ nanotubes are investigated, in order to elucidate their potential for photocatalytic applications. It is found that Si doped TiO$_{2}$ nanotubes are more stable than those doped with Ge, Sn, or Pb. All dopants lower the band gap, except the (Ge, Sn) co-doped structure, the decrease depending on the concentration and the type of dopant. Correspondingly, a redshift in the optical properties for all kinds of dopings is obtained. Even though a Pb mono- and co-doped TiO$_{2}$ nanotu

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Astrophysical Prior Information and Gravitational-wave Parameter Estimation

Chris Pankow, Laura Sampson, Leah Perri et al. · 2016 · arXiv

The detection of electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves has great promise for the investigation of many scientific questions. It has long been hoped that in addition to providing extra, non-gravitational information about the sources of these signals, the detection of an electromagnetic signal in conjunction with a gravitational wave could aid in the analysis of the gravitational signal itself. That is, knowledge of the sky location, inclination, and redshift of a binary could break degeneracies between these extrinsic, coordinate-dependent parameters and the physical parameters,

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Data-driven kinetic energy density fitting for orbital-free DFT: linear vs Gaussian process regression

Sergei Manzhos, Pavlo Golub · 2020 · arXiv

We study the dependence of kinetic energy densities (KED) on density-dependent variables that have been suggested in previous works on kinetic energy functionals (KEF) for orbital-free DFT (OF-DFT). We focus on the role of data distribution and on data and regressor selection. We compare unweighted and weighted linear and Gaussian process regressions of KED for light metals and a semiconductor. We find that good quality linear regression resulting in good energy-volume dependence is possible over density-dependent variables suggested in previous literature. This is achieved with weighted fitti

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Corrective In-Context Learning: Evaluating Self-Correction in Large Language Models

Mario Sanz-Guerrero, Katharina von der Wense · 2025 · arXiv

In-context learning (ICL) has transformed the use of large language models (LLMs) for NLP tasks, enabling few-shot learning by conditioning on labeled examples without finetuning. Despite its effectiveness, ICL is prone to errors, especially for challenging examples. With the goal of improving the performance of ICL, we propose corrective in-context learning (CICL), an approach that incorporates a model's incorrect predictions alongside ground truth corrections into the prompt, aiming to enhance classification accuracy through self-correction. However, contrary to our hypothesis, extensive exp

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Topic Level Disambiguation for Weak Queries

Hui Zhang, Kiduk Yang, Elin Jacob · 2015 · arXiv

Despite limited success, information retrieval (IR) systems today are not intelligent or reliable. IR systems return poor search results when users formulate their information needs into incomplete or ambiguous queries (i.e., weak queries). Therefore, one of the main challenges in modern IR research is to provide consistent results across all queries by improving the performance on weak queries. However, existing IR approaches such as query expansion are not overly effective because they make little effort to analyze and exploit the meanings of the queries. Furthermore, word sense disambiguati

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate

Philippe Laban, Tobias Schnabel, Jennifer Neville · 2026 · arXiv

Large Language Models (LLMs) are poised to disrupt knowledge work, with the emergence of delegated work as a new interaction paradigm (e.g., vibe coding). Delegation requires trust - the expectation that the LLM will faithfully execute the task without introducing errors into documents. We introduce DELEGATE-52 to study the readiness of AI systems in delegated workflows. DELEGATE-52 simulates long delegated workflows that require in-depth document editing across 52 professional domains, such as coding, crystallography, and music notation. Our large-scale experiment with 19 LLMs reveals that cu

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Bounds on Nonlocality and Random Access Codes from Extended Information Causality Principle

Prabhav Jain, Nikolai Miklin, Mariami Gachechiladze · 2026 · arXiv

Information Causality was introduced as a physical principle for constraining the set of nonlocal correlations. In recent work, we proposed an extension of Information Causality that allows correlations among Alice's inputs. This extended principle yields tighter constraints than the original formulation and recovers part of the quantum boundary in certain Bell scenarios. In this work, we further investigate the implications of extended Information Causality and apply it to scenarios beyond binary inputs and outputs. We derive a family of quantum Bell inequalities that strengthen previously kn

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Cross-Lingual Consistency of Factual Knowledge in Multilingual Language Models

Jirui Qi, Raquel Fernández, Arianna Bisazza · 2023 · arXiv

Multilingual large-scale Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have been shown to store considerable amounts of factual knowledge, but large variations are observed across languages. With the ultimate goal of ensuring that users with different language backgrounds obtain consistent feedback from the same model, we study the cross-lingual consistency (CLC) of factual knowledge in various multilingual PLMs. To this end, we propose a Ranking-based Consistency (RankC) metric to evaluate knowledge consistency across languages independently from accuracy. Using this metric, we conduct an in-depth analys

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Collaborative Distributed Hypothesis Testing

Gil Katz, Pablo Piantanida, Merouane Debbah · 2016 · arXiv

A collaborative distributed binary decision problem is considered. Two statisticians are required to declare the correct probability measure of two jointly distributed memoryless process, denoted by $X^n=(X_1,\dots,X_n)$ and $Y^n=(Y_1,\dots,Y_n)$, out of two possible probability measures on finite alphabets, namely $P_{XY}$ and $P_{\bar{X}\bar{Y}}$. The marginal samples given by $X^n$ and $Y^n$ are assumed to be available at different locations. The statisticians are allowed to exchange limited amount of data over multiple rounds of interactions, which differs from previous work that deals mai

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Hybrid Probabilistic-Snowball Sampling

Giulio Cantone, Venera Tomaselli · 2022 · arXiv

Snowball sampling is the common name for sampling designs on human populations where respondents are requested to share the questionnaire among their social ties. With some exceptions, estimates from snowball samplings are considered biased. However, the magnitude of the bias is influenced by a combination of elements of the sampling design and features of the target population. Hybrid Probabilistic-Snowball Sampling Designs (HPSSD) aims to reduce the main source of bias in the snowball sample through randomly oversampling the first stage 0 of the snowball. To check the behaviour of HPSSD for

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Optimal EEG Electrode Set for Emotion Recognition From Brain Signals: An Empirical Quest

Rumman Ahmed Prodhan, Sumya Akter, Tanmoy Sarkar Pias et al. · 2023 · arXiv

The human brain is a complex organ, still completely undiscovered, that controls almost all the parts of the body. Apart from survival, the human brain stimulates emotions. Recent research indicates that brain signals can be very effective for emotion recognition. However, which parts of the brain exhibit most of the emotions is still under-explored. In this study, we empirically analyze the contribution of each part of the brain in exhibiting emotions. We use the DEAP dataset to find the most optimal electrode set which eventually leads to the effective brain part associated with emotions. We

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Improved WKB analysis of cosmological perturbations

Roberto Casadio, Fabio Finelli, Mattia Luzzi et al. · 2004 · arXiv

Improved Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB)-type approximations are presented in order to study cosmological perturbations beyond the lowest order. Our methods are based on functions which approximate the true perturbation modes over the complete range of the independent (Langer) variable, from sub-horizon to super-horizon scales, and include the region near the turning point. We employ both a perturbative Green's function technique and an adiabatic (or ``semiclassical'') expansion (for a linear turning point) in order to compute higher order corrections. Improved general expressions for the WKB

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Comparative study of force-based classical density functional theory

Florian Sammüller, Sophie Hermann, Matthias Schmidt · 2022 · arXiv

We reexamine results obtained with the recently proposed density functional theory framework based on forces (force-DFT) [Tschopp et al., Phys. Rev. E 106, 014115 (2022)]. We compare inhomogeneous density profiles for hard sphere fluids to results from both standard density functional theory and from computer simulations. Test situations include the equilibrium hard sphere fluid adsorbed against a planar hard wall and the dynamical relaxation of hard spheres in a switched harmonic potential. The comparison to grand canonical Monte Carlo simulation profiles shows that equilibrium force-DFT alon

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

VideoJudge: Bootstrapping Enables Scalable Supervision of MLLM-as-a-Judge for Video Understanding

Abdul Waheed, Zhen Wu, Dareen Alharthi et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Precisely evaluating video understanding models remains challenging: commonly used metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and BERTScore fail to capture the fineness of human judgment, while obtaining such judgments through manual evaluation is costly. Recent work has explored using large language models (LLMs) or multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) as evaluators, but their extension to video understanding remains relatively unexplored. In this work, we introduce VideoJudge, a 3B and 7B-sized MLLM judge specialized to evaluate outputs from video understanding models (\textit{i.e.}, text responses conditioned on vide

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Unitarity Problems in 3$D$ Gravity Theories

Gokhan Alkac, Luca Basanisi, Ercan Kilicarslan et al. · 2017 · arXiv

We revisit the problem of the bulk-boundary unitarity clash in 2 + 1 dimensional gravity theories, which has been an obstacle in providing a viable dual two-dimensional conformal field theory for bulk gravity in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. Chiral gravity, which is a particular limit of cosmological topologically massive gravity (TMG), suffers from pertur- bative log-modes with negative energies inducing a non-unitary logarithmic boundary field theory. We show here that any f(R) extension of TMG does not improve the situation. We also study the perturbative modes in the metric formulation o

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The Curious Case of Representational Alignment: Unravelling Visio-Linguistic Tasks in Emergent Communication

Tom Kouwenhoven, Max Peeperkorn, Bram van Dijk et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Natural language has the universal properties of being compositional and grounded in reality. The emergence of linguistic properties is often investigated through simulations of emergent communication in referential games. However, these experiments have yielded mixed results compared to similar experiments addressing linguistic properties of human language. Here we address representational alignment as a potential contributing factor to these results. Specifically, we assess the representational alignment between agent image representations and between agent representations and input images.