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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.

1898 results for "Mpro" · page 48 of 64

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

R^2 Dark Matter

Jose A. R. Cembranos · 2010 · arXiv

There is a non-trivial four-derivative extension of the gravitational spectrum that is free of ghosts and phenomenologically viable. It is the so called $R^2$-gravity since it is defined by the only addition of a term proportional to the square of the scalar curvature. Just the presence of this term does not improve the ultraviolet behaviour of Einstein gravity but introduces one additional scalar degree of freedom that can account for the dark matter of our Universe.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Balancing forward and feedback error correction for erasure channels with unreliable feedback

Anant Sahai · 2007 · arXiv

The traditional information theoretic approach to studying feedback is to consider ideal instantaneous high-rate feedback of the channel outputs to the encoder. This was acceptable in classical work because the results were negative: Shannon pointed out that even perfect feedback often does not improve capacity and in the context of symmetric DMCs, Dobrushin showed that it does not improve the fixed block-coding error exponents in the interesting high rate regime. However, it has recently been shown that perfect feedback does allow great improvements in the asymptotic tradeoff between end-to-e

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Slave-boson based configuration-interaction approach for the Hubbard model

G. Seibold · 2008 · arXiv

Based on the Kotliar-Ruckenstein slave-boson scheme we develop a configuration-interaction (CI) approach which is suitable to improve the energy of symmetry-broken saddle-point solutions. The theory is applied to spin-polaron states in the Hubbard model and compared with analogous results obtained within the Hartree-Fock approximation. In addition we show that within the infinite ${\cal D}$ prescription of the Gutzwiller method a CI approach does not improve the variational result since in the thermodynamic limit matrix elements between different inhomogeneous states vanish due to an 'orthogon

Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Problems for Supersymmetry Breaking by the Dilaton in Strings from Charge and Color Breaking

J. A. Casas, A. Lleyda, C. Muñoz · 1996 · arXiv

The general constraints on the parameter space of soft-breaking terms, in order to avoid dangerous charge and color breaking minima, are applied to the four-dimensional string scenario where the dilaton is the source of supersymmetry breaking (dilaton-dominated limit). The results indicate that the whole parameter space is excluded on these grounds after imposing the present experimental data on the top mass. The inclusion of a non-vanishing cosmological constant does not improve essentially the prospects. Possible way-outs to this situation are briefly discussed.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Magnetic Moments of the Octet Baryons in the Colour-Dielectric Model

Moo-Sung Bae, Judith A. McGovern · 1995 · arXiv

Baryon magnetic moments are calculated in the colour-dielectric model with pion and kaon loops. The only free parameter of the model is determined from the nucleon isoscalar radius, and all SU(3) symmetry breaking, including that in the quark sector, is determined by mesonic masses and decay constants. Good agreement with experiment is obtained for the ratios of the magnetic moments, but the inclusion of kaons does not improve the results. The results obtained in this approach are significantly better than any that have been obtained in hedgehog-based models.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Fusion of Graph Neural Networks via Optimal Transport

Weronika Ormaniec, Michael Vollenweider, Elisa Hoskovec · 2025 · arXiv

In this paper, we explore the idea of combining GCNs into one model. To that end, we align the weights of different models layer-wise using optimal transport (OT). We present and evaluate three types of transportation costs and show that the studied fusion method consistently outperforms the performance of vanilla averaging. Finally, we present results suggesting that model fusion using OT is harder in the case of GCNs than MLPs and that incorporating the graph structure into the process does not improve the performance of the method.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Can long-range interactions stabilize quantum memory at nonzero temperature?

Olivier Landon-Cardinal, Beni Yoshida, David Poulin et al. · 2015 · arXiv

A two-dimensional topologically ordered quantum memory is well protected against error if the energy gap is large compared to the temperature, but this protection does not improve as the system size increases. We review and critique some recent proposals for improving the memory time by introducing long-range interactions among anyons, noting that instability with respect to small local perturbations of the Hamiltonian is a generic problem for such proposals. We also discuss some broader issues regarding the prospects for scalable quantum memory in two-dimensional systems.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Analysis of corrections to the eikonal approximation

Chloë Hebborn, Pierre Capel · 2017 · arXiv

Various corrections to the eikonal approximations are studied for two- and three-body nuclear collisions with the goal to extend the range of validity of this approximation to beam energies of 10 MeV/nucleon. Wallace's correction does not improve much the elastic-scattering cross sections obtained at the usual eikonal approximation. On the contrary, a semiclassical approximation that substitutes the impact parameter by a complex distance of closest approach computed with the projectile-target optical potential efficiently corrects the eikonal approximation. This opens the possibility to analyz

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Generalization of short coherent control pulses: extension to arbitrary rotations

S. Pasini, G. S. Uhrig · 2008 · arXiv

We generalize the problem of the coherent control of small quantum systems to the case where the quantum bit (qubit) is subject to a fully general rotation. Following the ideas developed in Pasini et al (2008 Phys. Rev. A 77, 032315), the systematic expansion in the shortness of the pulse is extended to the case where the pulse acts on the qubit as a general rotation around an axis of rotation varying in time. The leading and the next-leading corrections are computed. For certain pulses we prove that the general rotation does not improve on the simpler rotation with fixed axis.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Does Pre-training Induce Systematic Inference? How Masked Language Models Acquire Commonsense Knowledge

Ian Porada, Alessandro Sordoni, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung · 2021 · arXiv

Transformer models pre-trained with a masked-language-modeling objective (e.g., BERT) encode commonsense knowledge as evidenced by behavioral probes; however, the extent to which this knowledge is acquired by systematic inference over the semantics of the pre-training corpora is an open question. To answer this question, we selectively inject verbalized knowledge into the minibatches of a BERT model during pre-training and evaluate how well the model generalizes to supported inferences. We find generalization does not improve over the course of pre-training, suggesting that commonsense knowled

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Age of Information Upon Decisions

Yunquan Dong, Zhengchuan Chen, Shanyun Liu et al. · 2018 · arXiv

We consider an M/M/1 update-and-decide system where Poisson distributed decisions are made based on the received updates. We propose to characterize the freshness of the received updates at decision epochs with Age upon Decisions (AuD). Under the first-come-first-served policy (FCFS), the closed form average AuD is derived. We show that the average AuD of the system is determined by the arrival rate and the service rate, and is independent of the decision rate. Thus, merely increasing the decision rate does not improve the timeliness of decisions. Nevertheless, increasing the arrival rate and

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Decoherence in adiabatic quantum computation

M. H. S. Amin, Dmitri V. Averin, James A. Nesteroff · 2007 · arXiv

We have studied the decoherence properties of adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) in the presence of in general non-Markovian, e.g., low-frequency, noise. The developed description of the incoherent Landau-Zener transitions shows that the global AQC maintains its properties even for decoherence larger than the minimum gap at the anticrossing of the two lowest energy levels. The more efficient local AQC, however, does not improve scaling of the computation time with the number of qubits $n$ as in the decoherence-free case. The scaling improvement requires phase coherence throughout the computat

Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Error Exponents for Randomised List Decoding

Henrique K. Miyamoto, Sheng Yang · 2026 · arXiv

This paper studies random-coding error exponents of randomised list decoding, in which the decoder randomly selects $L$ messages with probabilities proportional to the decoding metric of the codewords. The exponents (or bounds) are given for mismatched, and then particularised to matched and universal decoding metrics. Two regimes are studied: for fixed list size, we derive an ensemble-tight random-coding error exponent, and show that, for the matched metric, it does not improve the error exponent of ordinary decoding. For list sizes growing exponentially with the block-length, we provide a no

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Testing the simplicity of strategy-proof mechanisms

Alexander L. Brown, Daniel G. Stephenson, Rodrigo A. Velez · 2024 · arXiv

This paper experimentally evaluates four mechanisms intended to achieve the Uniform outcome in rationing problems (Sprumont, 1991). Our benchmark is the dominant-strategy, direct-revelation mechanism of the Uniform rule. A strategically equivalent mechanism that provides non-binding feedback during the reporting period greatly improves performance. A sequential revelation mechanism produces modest improvements despite not possessing dominant strategies. A novel, obviously strategy-proof mechanism, devised by Arribillaga et al. (2023), does not improve performance. We characterize each alternat

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

HULAT at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Data augmentation for pre-trained transformers applied to the detection of sexism in social media

Isabel Segura-Bedmar · 2023 · arXiv

This paper describes our participation in SemEval-2023 Task 10, whose goal is the detection of sexism in social media. We explore some of the most popular transformer models such as BERT, DistilBERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet. We also study different data augmentation techniques to increase the training dataset. During the development phase, our best results were obtained by using RoBERTa and data augmentation for tasks B and C. However, the use of synthetic data does not improve the results for task C. We participated in the three subtasks. Our approach still has much room for improvement, especiall

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Will Annotators Disagree? Identifying Subjectivity in Value-Laden Arguments

Amir Homayounirad, Enrico Liscio, Tong Wang et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Aggregating multiple annotations into a single ground truth label may hide valuable insights into annotator disagreement, particularly in tasks where subjectivity plays a crucial role. In this work, we explore methods for identifying subjectivity in recognizing the human values that motivate arguments. We evaluate two main approaches: inferring subjectivity through value prediction vs. directly identifying subjectivity. Our experiments show that direct subjectivity identification significantly improves the model performance of flagging subjective arguments. Furthermore, combining contrastive l

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Performance of Opportunistic Fixed Gain Bidirectional Relaying With Outdated CSI

Fahd Ahmed Khan, Kamel Tourki, Mohamed-Slim Alouini et al. · 2013 · arXiv

This paper studies the impact of using outdated channel state information for relay selection on the performance of a network where two sources communicate with each other via fixed-gain amplifyand- forward relays. For a Rayleigh faded channel, closed-form expressions for the outage probability, moment generating function and symbol error rate are derived. Simulations results are also presented to corroborate the derived analytical results. It is shown that adding relays does not improve the performance if the channel is substantially outdated. Furthermore, relay location is also taken into co

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Optimal Use of Experience in First Person Shooter Environments

Matthew Aitchison · 2019 · arXiv

Although reinforcement learning has made great strides recently, a continuing limitation is that it requires an extremely high number of interactions with the environment. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of reusing experience from the experience replay buffer in the Deep Q-Learning algorithm. We test the effectiveness of applying learning update steps multiple times per environmental step in the VizDoom environment and show first, this requires a change in the learning rate, and second that it does not improve the performance of the agent. Furthermore, we show that updating less fr

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

Does enforcing fairness mitigate biases caused by subpopulation shift?

Subha Maity, Debarghya Mukherjee, Mikhail Yurochkin et al. · 2020 · arXiv

Many instances of algorithmic bias are caused by subpopulation shifts. For example, ML models often perform worse on demographic groups that are underrepresented in the training data. In this paper, we study whether enforcing algorithmic fairness during training improves the performance of the trained model in the \emph{target domain}. On one hand, we conceive scenarios in which enforcing fairness does not improve performance in the target domain. In fact, it may even harm performance. On the other hand, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which enforcing algorithmic fairness l

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Mitigating Errors in DC Magnetometry via Zero-Noise Extrapolation

John S. Van Dyke, Zackary White, Gregory Quiroz · 2024 · arXiv

Zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE), a technique to estimate quantum circuit expectation values through noise scaling and extrapolation, is well-studied in the context of quantum computing. We examine the applicability of ZNE to the field of quantum sensing. Focusing on the problem of DC magnetometry using the Ramsey protocol, we show that the sensitivity (in the sense of the minimum detectable signal) does not improve upon using ZNE in the slope detection scheme. On the other hand, signals of sufficiently large magnitude can be estimated more accurately. Our results are robust across various noise

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Persistence Homology of TEDtalk: Do Sentence Embeddings Have a Topological Shape?

Shouman Das, Syed A. Haque, Md. Iftekhar Tanveer · 2021 · arXiv

\emph{Topological data analysis} (TDA) has recently emerged as a new technique to extract meaningful discriminitve features from high dimensional data. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of applying TDA to improve the classification accuracy of public speaking rating. We calculated \emph{persistence image vectors} for the sentence embeddings of TEDtalk data and feed this vectors as additional inputs to our machine learning models. We have found a negative result that this topological information does not improve the model accuracy significantly. In some cases, it makes the accuracy

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEconomics, Econometrics and Finance

Judgment in macroeconomic output growth predictions: Efficiency, accuracy and persistence

Michael Pedersen · 2024 · arXiv

The present study applies observations of individual predictions of the first three releases of the US output growth rate to evaluate how the applied judgment affects prediction efficiency and accuracy as well as if judgment is persistent. While the first two issues have been assessed in other studies, there is little evidence on the formation of judgment in macroeconomic projections. Most of the forecasters produce unbiased predictions, but employing the median Bloomberg projection as baseline, it turns out that judgment generally does not improve accuracy. There seems to be persistence in th

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Quantum and private capacities of low-noise channels

Felix Leditzky, Debbie Leung, Graeme Smith · 2017 · arXiv

We determine both the quantum and the private capacities of low-noise quantum channels to leading orders in the channel's distance to the perfect channel. It has been an open problem for more than 20 years to determine the capacities of some of these low-noise channels such as the depolarizing channel. We also show that both capacities are equal to the single-letter coherent information of the channel, again to leading orders. We thus find that, in the low noise regime, super-additivity and degenerate codes have negligible benefit for the quantum capacity, and shielding does not improve the pr

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Three-dimensional physics and the pressure of hot QCD

A. Hietanen, K. Kajantie, M. Laine et al. · 2008 · arXiv

We update Monte Carlo simulations of the three-dimensional SU(3) + adjoint Higgs theory, by extrapolating carefully to the infinite volume and continuum limits, in order to estimate the contribution of the infrared modes to the pressure of hot QCD. The sum of infrared contributions beyond the known 4-loop order turns out to be a smooth function, of a reasonable magnitude and specific sign. Unfortunately, adding this function to the known 4-loop terms does not improve the match to four-dimensional lattice data, in spite of the fact that other quantities, such as correlation lengths, spatial str

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The Whole is Better than the Sum: Using Aggregated Demonstrations in In-Context Learning for Sequential Recommendation

Lei Wang, Ee-Peng Lim · 2024 · arXiv

Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent performance on various NLP tasks. To use LLMs as strong sequential recommenders, we explore the in-context learning approach to sequential recommendation. We investigate the effects of instruction format, task consistency, demonstration selection, and number of demonstrations. As increasing the number of demonstrations in ICL does not improve accuracy despite using a long prompt, we propose a novel method called LLMSRec-Syn that incorporates multiple demonstration users into one aggregated demonstration. Our experiments on three recommendation

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Few More Examples May Be Worth Billions of Parameters

Yuval Kirstain, Patrick Lewis, Sebastian Riedel et al. · 2021 · arXiv

We investigate the dynamics of increasing the number of model parameters versus the number of labeled examples across a wide variety of tasks. Our exploration reveals that while scaling parameters consistently yields performance improvements, the contribution of additional examples highly depends on the task's format. Specifically, in open question answering tasks, enlarging the training set does not improve performance. In contrast, classification, extractive question answering, and multiple choice tasks benefit so much from additional examples that collecting a few hundred examples is often

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

The Second Picard iteration of NLS on the $2d$ sphere does not regularize Gaussian random initial data

Nicolas Burq, Nicolas Camps, Mickaël Latocca et al. · 2024 · arXiv

We consider the Wick ordered cubic Schrödinger equation (NLS) posed on the two-dimensional sphere, with initial data distributed according to a Gaussian measure. We show that the second Picard iteration does not improve the regularity of the initial data in the scale of the classical Sobolev spaces. This is in sharp contrast with the Wick ordered NLS on the two-dimensional tori, a model for which we know from the work of Bourgain that the second Picard iteration gains one half derivative. Our proof relies on identifying a singular part of the nonlinearity. We show that this singular part is re

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Entanglement production by independent quantum channels

Örs Legeza, Florian Gebhard, Jörg Rissler · 2005 · arXiv

For the one-dimensional Hubbard model subject to periodic boundary conditions we construct a unitary transformation between basis states so that open boundary conditions apply for the transformed Hamiltonian. Despite the fact that the one-particle and two-particle interaction matrices link nearest and next-nearest neighbors only, the performance of the density-matrix renormalization group method for the transformed Hamiltonian does not improve. Some of the new interactions act as independent quantum channels which generate the same level of entanglement as periodic boundary conditions in the o

Methods Dead-EndOpen accessComputer Science

Another Facet of LIG Parsing

Pierre Boullier · 1996 · arXiv

In this paper we present a new parsing algorithm for linear indexed grammars (LIGs) in the same spirit as the one described in (Vijay-Shanker and Weir, 1993) for tree adjoining grammars. For a LIG $L$ and an input string $x$ of length $n$, we build a non ambiguous context-free grammar whose sentences are all (and exclusively) valid derivation sequences in $L$ which lead to $x$. We show that this grammar can be built in ${\cal O}(n^6)$ time and that individual parses can be extracted in linear time with the size of the extracted parse tree. Though this ${\cal O}(n^6)$ upper bound does not impro

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

New Physics effect on $B_c \to J/ψτ\barν$ in relation to the $R_{D^{(*)}}$ anomaly

Ryoutaro Watanabe · 2017 · arXiv

We study possible new physics (NP) effects on $B_c \to J/ψτ\barν$, which has been recently measured at LHCb as the ratio of $R_{J/ψ} = \mathcal B(B_c \to J/ψτ\barν)/\mathcal B(B_c \to J/ψμ\barν)$. Combining it with the long-standing $R_{D^{(*)}}$ measurements, in which the discrepancy with the prediction of the standard model is present, we find possible solutions to the anomaly by several NP types. Then, we see that adding the $R_{J/ψ}$ measurement does not improve NP fit to data, but the NP scenarios still give better $χ^2$ than the SM. We also investigate indirect NP constraints from the li