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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.

20261 results in Negative / Null Result Report · page 545 of 676

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Joint Beamforming and Speaker-Attributed ASR for Real Distant-Microphone Meeting Transcription

Can Cui, Imran Ahamad Sheikh, Mostafa Sadeghi et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Distant-microphone meeting transcription is a challenging task. State-of-the-art end-to-end speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (SA-ASR) architectures lack a multichannel noise and reverberation reduction front-end, which limits their performance. In this paper, we introduce a joint beamforming and SA-ASR approach for real meeting transcription. We first describe a data alignment and augmentation method to pretrain a neural beamformer on real meeting data. We then compare fixed, hybrid, and fully neural beamformers as front-ends to the SA-ASR model. Finally, we jointly optimize the

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

InsCLR: Improving Instance Retrieval with Self-Supervision

Zelu Deng, Yujie Zhong, Sheng Guo et al. · 2021 · arXiv

This work aims at improving instance retrieval with self-supervision. We find that fine-tuning using the recently developed self-supervised (SSL) learning methods, such as SimCLR and MoCo, fails to improve the performance of instance retrieval. In this work, we identify that the learnt representations for instance retrieval should be invariant to large variations in viewpoint and background etc., whereas self-augmented positives applied by the current SSL methods can not provide strong enough signals for learning robust instance-level representations. To overcome this problem, we propose InsCL

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

On the Transferability of Minimal Prediction Preserving Inputs in Question Answering

Shayne Longpre, Yi Lu, Christopher DuBois · 2020 · arXiv

Recent work (Feng et al., 2018) establishes the presence of short, uninterpretable input fragments that yield high confidence and accuracy in neural models. We refer to these as Minimal Prediction Preserving Inputs (MPPIs). In the context of question answering, we investigate competing hypotheses for the existence of MPPIs, including poor posterior calibration of neural models, lack of pretraining, and "dataset bias" (where a model learns to attend to spurious, non-generalizable cues in the training data). We discover a perplexing invariance of MPPIs to random training seed, model architecture

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics

ScoreStop: Gradient-based early stopping using functional score tests

Oliver J. Hines, Christian L. Hines · 2026 · arXiv

Gradient boosted decision trees require a stopping rule to avoid overfitting. The standard rule monitors a validation loss and stops if the loss fails to improve for a fixed patience period. However, the patience parameter has no interpretable scale and validation losses can be noisy or implicitly defined by a user-specified gradient. We propose ScoreStop, a gradient-based early-stopping rule that casts the stopping decision at each iteration as a test of the null hypothesis that the current predictor is the population risk minimizer. We use a functional score test, computed on validation data

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Uncovering the Impact of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Direct Preference Optimization: Lessons from Text-to-SQL

Hanbing Liu, Haoyang Li, Xiaokang Zhang et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation. However, when applied to Text-to-SQL datasets, it often fails to improve performance and can even degrade it. Our investigation reveals the root cause: unlike math and code tasks, which naturally integrate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with DPO, Text-to-SQL datasets typically include only final answers (gold SQL queries) without detailed CoT solutions. By augmenting Text-to-SQL datasets with synthetic CoT solutions, we achieve, for the first time, consistent and

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The Adverse Effects of Omitting Records in Differential Privacy: How Sampling and Suppression Degrade the Privacy--Utility Tradeoff (Long Version)

Àlex Miranda-Pascual, Javier Parra-Arnau, Thorsten Strufe · 2026 · arXiv

Sampling is renowned for its privacy amplification in differential privacy (DP), and is often assumed to improve the utility of a DP mechanism by allowing a noise reduction. In this paper, we further show that this last assumption is flawed: When measuring utility at equal privacy levels, sampling as preprocessing consistently yields penalties due to utility loss from omitting records over all canonical DP mechanisms -- Laplace, Gaussian, exponential, and report noisy max -- , as well as recent applications of sampling, such as clustering. Extending this analysis, we investigate suppression as

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

From KAN to GR-KAN: Advancing Speech Enhancement with KAN-Based Methodology

Haoyang Li, Yuchen Hu, Chen Chen et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Deep neural network (DNN)-based speech enhancement (SE) usually uses conventional activation functions, which lack the expressiveness to capture complex multiscale structures needed for high-fidelity SE. Group-Rational KAN (GR-KAN), a variant of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN), retains KAN's expressiveness while improving scalability on complex tasks. We adapt GR-KAN to existing DNN-based SE by replacing dense layers with GR-KAN layers in the time-frequency (T-F) domain MP-SENet and adapting GR-KAN's activations into the 1D CNN layers in the time-domain Demucs. Results on Voicebank-DEMAND sho

Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Knowledge of oxygen therapy among healthcare professionals in non-intubated patients: a cross-sectional study in Somalia.

Duman Aydin, Küçükosman, Mohamed et al. · 2026 · BMC medical education

Although oxygen therapy (OT) is a fundamental and life-saving intervention in the management of hypoxemia, it may lead to serious complications when applied incorrectly or in an uncontrolled manner. The aim of this study is to evaluate the…

View details →DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-09766-8
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Revealing the Challenges of Attention-FFN Disaggregation for Modern MoE Models and Hardware Systems

Guowei Liu, Hongming Li, Yaning Guo et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Deploying large-scale MoE models presents challenges in memory capacity and bandwidth for expert activation. While Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD) has emerged as a potential architecture to decouple compute and memory resources, its performance boundaries compared to standard large-scale Expert Parallelism (EP) remain underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of AFD by extending the roofline model to the communication level, correlating interconnect bandwidth, arithmetic intensity, and Hardware FLOPS Utilization (HFU). Our analysis reveals a dead zone on standard cluste

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Exploring System 1 and 2 communication for latent reasoning in LLMs

Julian Coda-Forno, Zhuokai Zhao, Qiang Zhang et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Should LLM reasoning live in a separate module, or within a single model's forward pass and representational space? We study dual-architecture latent reasoning, where a fluent Base exchanges latent messages with a Coprocessor, and test two hypotheses aimed at improving latent communication over Liu et al. (2024): (H1) increase channel capacity; (H2) learn communication via joint finetuning. Under matched latent-token budgets on GPT-2 and Qwen-3, H2 is consistently strongest while H1 yields modest gains. A unified soft-embedding baseline, a single model with the same forward pass and shared rep

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

BiasBuster: a Neural Approach for Accurate Estimation of Population Statistics using Biased Location Data

Sepanta Zeighami, Cyrus Shahabi · 2024 · arXiv

While extremely useful (e.g., for COVID-19 forecasting and policy-making, urban mobility analysis and marketing, and obtaining business insights), location data collected from mobile devices often contain data from a biased population subset, with some communities over or underrepresented in the collected datasets. As a result, aggregate statistics calculated from such datasets (as is done by various companies including Safegraph, Google, and Facebook), while ignoring the bias, leads to an inaccurate representation of population statistics. Such statistics will not only be generally inaccurate

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Rethinking Drug-Drug Interaction Modeling as Generalizable Relation Learning

Dong Xu, Jiantao Wu, Qihua Pan et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction is central to drug discovery and clinical development, particularly in the context of increasingly prevalent polypharmacy. Although existing computational methods achieve strong performance on standard benchmarks, they often fail to generalize to realistic deployment scenarios, where most candidate drug pairs involve previously unseen drugs and validated interactions are scarce. We demonstrate that proximity in the embedding spaces of prevailing molecule-centric DDI models does not reliably correspond to interaction labels, and that simply scaling up mode

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Counterparty Modeling is Not Strategy: The Limits of LLM Negotiators

Romain Cosentino, Sarath Shekkizhar, Adam Earle et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Negotiation requires more than inferring what the other side wants: it requires using that information to make advantageous offers and counteroffers over multiple turns. We study whether large language model (LLM) agents do this in a controlled multi-attribute bargaining environment. We find that current LLM agents can model a counterparty's preferences, but do not reliably turn that knowledge into strategic bargaining. When given negotiating partner preference information, agents model it accurately and early in their reasoning traces, yet this does not reliably improve outcomes for the infor

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

CroCo: Cross-Lingual Contrastive Preference Tuning on Self-Generations

Mike Zhang, Ali Basirat, Desmond Elliott · 2026 · arXiv

Prior work establishes that controlled contrastiveness between self-generated responses from large language models, set via reward scores, improves downstream preference tuning in English. We extend this method to multiple languages and evaluate two models across a total of 14 high and low-resource languages on a diverse set of tasks. Our central finding is that cross-lingual contrastive preference tuning on self-generations (CroCo) transfers without language-specific preference annotation. A reward model trained on English preferences (atop a multilingual base) produces useful within-language

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

N-ODE Transformer: A Depth-Adaptive Variant of the Transformer Using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

Aaron Baier-Reinio, Hans De Sterck · 2020 · arXiv

We use neural ordinary differential equations to formulate a variant of the Transformer that is depth-adaptive in the sense that an input-dependent number of time steps is taken by the ordinary differential equation solver. Our goal in proposing the N-ODE Transformer is to investigate whether its depth-adaptivity may aid in overcoming some specific known theoretical limitations of the Transformer in handling nonlocal effects. Specifically, we consider the simple problem of determining the parity of a binary sequence, for which the standard Transformer has known limitations that can only be ove

Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Performance of Artificial Intelligence Chatbots Compared with Young Academic Urologists in Reconstructive Urology.

Escoffier, Hedhli, Campos-Juanatey et al. · 2026 · The French journal of urology

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in surgery, but its role in reconstructive urology remains insufficiently studied. The aim of this work was to evaluate the theoretical knowledge of several AI platforms and compare their…

View details →DOI: 10.1016/j.fjurol.2026.103150
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

A Unified Approach to Enforce Non-Negativity Constraint in Neural Network Approximation for Optimal Voltage Regulation

Jiaqi Wu, Jingyi Yuan, Yang Weng et al. · 2025 · arXiv

Power system voltage regulation is crucial to maintain power quality while integrating intermittent renewable resources in distribution grids. However, the system model on the grid edge is often unknown, making it difficult to model physical equations for optimal control. Therefore, previous work proposes structured data-driven methods like input convex neural networks (ICNN) for "optimal" control without relying on a physical model. While ICNNs offer theoretical guarantees based on restrictive assumptions of non-negative neural network parameters, can one improve the approximation power with

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Fully-Dynamic All-Pairs Shortest Paths: Likely Optimal Worst-Case Update Time

Xiao Mao · 2023 · arXiv

The All-Pairs Shortest Paths (APSP) problem is one of the fundamental problems in theoretical computer science. It asks to compute the distance matrix of a given $n$-vertex graph. We revisit the classical problem of maintaining the distance matrix under a fully dynamic setting undergoing vertex insertions and deletions with a fast worst-case running time and efficient space usage. Although an algorithm with amortized update-time $\tilde O(n ^ 2)$ has been known for nearly two decades [Demetrescu and Italiano, STOC 2003], the current best algorithm for worst-case running time with efficient spa

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Understanding and Analyzing Model Robustness and Knowledge-Transfer in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation using TX-Ray

Vageesh Saxena, Sharid Loáiciga, Nils Rethmeier · 2024 · arXiv

Neural networks have demonstrated significant advancements in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) compared to conventional phrase-based approaches. However, Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) in extremely low-resource settings remains underexplored. This research investigates how knowledge transfer across languages can enhance MNMT in such scenarios. Using the Tatoeba translation challenge dataset from Helsinki NLP, we perform English-German, English-French, and English-Spanish translations, leveraging minimal parallel data to establish cross-lingual mappings. Unlike conventional meth

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

Learning-based Axial Video Motion Magnification

Kwon Byung-Ki, Oh Hyun-Bin, Kim Jun-Seong et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Video motion magnification amplifies invisible small motions to be perceptible, which provides humans with a spatially dense and holistic understanding of small motions in the scene of interest. This is based on the premise that magnifying small motions enhances the legibility of motions. In the real world, however, vibrating objects often possess convoluted systems that have complex natural frequencies, modes, and directions. Existing motion magnification often fails to improve legibility since the intricate motions still retain complex characteristics even after being magnified, which may di

Negative / Null Result Report

The P-element Has Not Significant Effect on the Drosophila simulans Viability

L. P. Zakharenko, D. V. Petrovskii, R. A. Bykov · 2023 · Молекулярная биология

Cases of horizontal transfer of transposable elements (TEs) between species are known for the Drosophilidae family. In the middle of the last century, the case of horizontal transfer of the P-element from the Drosophila willistoni to the…

View details →DOI: 10.31857/s0026898423020258
Negative / Null Result Report

Effect of the Extracts from Lichens and Lichenophilic Fungi on in vitro Growth of Clinically Significant Microorganisms

T. A. Pankratov, R. E. Shcherbatov, A. A. Del’tsov · 2023 · Микробиология

Abstract—Activity of the ethanol extracts from lichens (LE), of the cultures of lichenophilic (endobiotic) fungi (LFE), and of ethanol extracts from these cultures was tested using the following test organisms: Escherichia coli, Salmonella…

View details →DOI: 10.31857/s002636562360027x
Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

vNOTES Pelvic Reconstruction and Presacral-Uterosacral Ligament Compound Suspension for Treatment of Multicompartment Pelvic Organ Prolapse: A Three-Year, Three-Arm, Open-Label, Randomized Controlled Trial.

Peng, Wang, Xiao et al. · 2026 · Journal of minimally invasive gynecology

To compare the effectiveness and safety of transvaginal natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (vNOTES) pelvic reconstruction (PRC), vNOTES presacral-uterosacral ligament suspension (PULS), and sacrospinous ligament fixation…

View details →DOI: 10.1016/j.jmig.2026.06.024
Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Material fracture/retention rates of occluso-proximal composite resin restorations with polyethylene fibers in primary molars: an interim randomized controlled trial.

Rocha, Dos Anjos, Pinho et al. · 2026 · Journal of dentistry

This 12-month, double-blind, parallel, randomized controlled trial compared the material fracture/retention rates of occluso-proximal direct composite resin restorations associated with polyethylene fiber (CR+PF; Ribbond®) with…

View details →DOI: 10.1016/j.jdent.2026.106863
Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Generative Artificial Intelligence for Orthognathic Planning: Patient-Specific 3-Dimensional Jaw Reference Forms Conditioned on the Cranial Base.

Kim, Yang, Kuang et al. · 2026 · Journal of oral and maxillofacial surgery : official journal of the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons

Conventional cephalometry relies on measurements derived from a limited set of landmarks and population-based norms, which may not fully capture individual skeletal form. Although evaluated independently, many cephalometric variables…

View details →DOI: 10.1016/j.joms.2026.06.005
Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Using a hand-held pupillometer to quantify pupil constriction as part of the accommodation reflex.

Olson, Perera, Kamal et al. · 2026 · Journal of clinical neuroscience : official journal of the Neurosurgical Society of Australasia

Quantitative pupillometry (QP) provides a reliable measure of the pupillary light reflex. The pupil accommodation reflex (P-AR) occurs when there is a change in visual focus from near to far or from far to near. The ability to measure the…

View details →DOI: 10.1016/j.jocn.2026.112161
Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Clinical outcomes of endovascular treatment in patients with large ischemic strokes selected by non-contrast computed tomography within the extended time window.

Jiang, Zhu, Gan et al. · 2026 · European journal of radiology

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness and safety of endovascular treatment (EVT) in patients with large ischemic strokes assessed by non-contrast CT (NCCT) within the extended time window. This study was a sub-analysis of a…

View details →DOI: 10.1016/j.ejrad.2026.113034
Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

The effect of post-success handwashing on insight problem solving.

Zhao, Wang · 2026 · Acta psychologica

Handwashing, as a common physical cleansing behavior, not only serves a physiological cleaning function but is also believed to symbolically "wash away" emotional experiences or mental residues. Previous research has primarily focused on…

View details →DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2026.107323
Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Does postoperative gabapentinoid prescription reduce chronic opioid use following short-segment lumbar instrumentation?

Karnati, Wu, Kaghazchi et al. · 2026 · Journal of neurosurgery. Spine

The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of initial postoperative gabapentinoid prescription on chronic postoperative opioid use in patients who underwent short-segment lumbar instrumentation by using a large multicenter electronic…

View details →DOI: 10.3171/2026.2.spine25802
Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine

Evaluation of Large Language Models for Structured Data Extraction From Interstitial Lung Disease Clinical Notes: Comparative Study.

Chen, Maddali, Langlotz et al. · 2026 · Journal of medical Internet research

Most clinically relevant data are in unstructured clinical notes, which are verbose and imprecise, making structured data extraction a costly bottleneck for screening patients for studies or maintaining health care registries. This…

View details →DOI: 10.2196/90547