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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.

21742 results · page 617 of 725

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Concurrent CNN-RNN Approach for Multi-Step Wind Power Forecasting

Syed Kazmi, Berk Gorgulu, Mucahit Cevik et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Wind power forecasting helps with the planning for the power systems by contributing to having a higher level of certainty in decision-making. Due to the randomness inherent to meteorological events (e.g., wind speeds), making highly accurate long-term predictions for wind power can be extremely difficult. One approach to remedy this challenge is to utilize weather information from multiple points across a geographical grid to obtain a holistic view of the wind patterns, along with temporal information from the previous power outputs of the wind farms. Our proposed CNN-RNN architecture combine

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

AnxietyFaceTrack: A Smartphone-Based Non-Intrusive Approach for Detecting Social Anxiety Using Facial Features

Nilesh Kumar Sahu, Snehil Gupta, Haroon R Lone · 2025 · arXiv

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a widespread mental health condition, yet its lack of objective markers hinders timely detection and intervention. While previous research has focused on behavioral and non-verbal markers of SAD in structured activities (e.g., speeches or interviews), these settings fail to replicate real-world, unstructured social interactions fully. Identifying non-verbal markers in naturalistic, unstaged environments is essential for developing ubiquitous and non-intrusive monitoring solutions. To address this gap, we present AnxietyFaceTrack, a study leveraging facial video

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Comparison of magnetic diffusion and reconnection in ideal and resistive relativistic magnetohydrodynamics, ideal magnetodynamics, and resistive force-free electrodynamics

Michael P. Grehan, Tanisha Ghosal, James R. Beattie et al. · 2025 · arXiv

High-energy astrophysical systems and compact objects are frequently modeled using ideal relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) or force-free electrodynamic (FFE) simulations, with the underlying assumption that the discretisation from the numerical scheme introduces an effective (numerical) magnetic resistivity that adequately resembles an explicit resistivity. However, it is crucial to note that numerical resistivity can fail to replicate essential features of explicit resistivity. In this study, we compare the 1D resistive decay and 2D reconnection properties of four commonly used physical

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Toward Reliable Machine Unlearning: Theory, Algorithms, and Evaluation

Ali Ebrahimpour-Boroojeny · 2025 · arXiv

We propose new methodologies for both unlearning random set of samples and class unlearning and show that they outperform existing methods. The main driver of our unlearning methods is the similarity of predictions to a retrained model on both the forget and remain samples. We introduce Adversarial Machine UNlearning (AMUN), which surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods for image classification based on SOTA MIA scores. AMUN lowers the model's confidence on forget samples by fine-tuning on their corresponding adversarial examples. Through theoretical analysis, we identify factors governing AM

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

When Youth Enter the Algorithmic Wild: Discovering and Understanding Potentially Harmful Teen Videos on Douyin and Kwai

Shaoxuan Zhou, Yafei Sun, Jing Zhang et al. · 2026 · arXiv

Short-video platforms like Douyin and Kwai have become central to adolescent digital life, but they also risk exposing teens to algorithmically amplified harmful content. Despite its societal importance, the scale, mechanisms, and real-world impact of this exposure remain poorly understood. Measuring it is challenging: recommendation feeds are personalized black boxes, harmful content employs sophisticated evasion tactics, and naive crawlers fail to replicate authentic teen behavior. To bridge this gap, we propose PHTV-Scout, the first large-scale, behaviorally grounded measurement framework f

Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

WebChallenger: A Reliable and Efficient Generalist Web Agent

Jayoo Hwang, Xiaowen Zhang, Vedant Padwal · 2026 · arXiv

Autonomous web navigation remains challenging for LLM agents, and the strongest generalist systems rely on proprietary reasoning models whose inference cost is prohibitive for the repetitive tasks where such agents would be most useful. We argue this gap stems not from insufficient model capability but from agent architectures that fail to replicate three human cognitive advantages: selective attention to relevant page regions, persistent memory of website structure, and procedural fluency with common interaction patterns. We introduce WebChallenger, a web agent framework that addresses each g

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 accessMathematics

Operational Dosage: Implications of Capacity Constraints for the Design and Interpretation of Experiments

Justin Boutilier, Jonas Oddur Jonasson, Hannah Li et al. · 2024 · arXiv

We study RCTs that evaluate the impact of service interventions, for example, teachers or advisors conducting proactive outreach to at-risk students, medical providers giving medication adherence support by calling or texting, or social workers that conduct home visits. A defining feature of service interventions is that they are delivered by a capacity-constrained resource -- teachers, healthcare providers, or social workers -- whose limited availability creates causal inference complications. Because participants share a finite service capacity, adding more participants can reduce the timeli

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Does the random nature of cell-virus interactions during in vitro infections affect TCID$_{50}$ measurements and parameter estimation by mathematical models?

Christian Quirouette, Risavarshni Thevakumaran, Kyosuke Adachi et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Endpoint dilution (TCID50) assays cannot count the number of infectious virions (IVs), and instead are limited to counting the number of Specific INfections caused by the sample (SIN). The latter depends not only on whether virions are infectious, but also on the cells and the experimental conditions under which they interact. These interactions are random and controlled by parameters such as the rates at which IVs lose infectivity, enter cells, or fail to replicate following cell entry. Here, stochastic TCID50 assays are simulated to determine how the random number of infected wells relates t

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Probing non-perturbative QCD aspects on particle production in pp collisions with forward-backward correlations using \texttt{PYTHIA8}

Rohit Agarwala, Kalyan Dey · 2025 · arXiv

We employ PYTHIA8 simulations to study forward-backward (FB) correlations in pp collisions at LHC energies, probing non-perturbative QCD dynamics via color reconnection (CR) and QCD radiation (ISR/FSR). Using \texttt{PYTHIA8} (v8.311) under ALICE/ATLAS kinematics, we analyze: extensive: FB multiplicity ($b_{\rm corr}^{\rm mult}$) and summed $p_{\rm T}$ ($b_{\rm corr}^{\sum p_{\rm T}}$) correlations; intensive: FB mean $p_{\rm T}$ ($b_{\rm corr}^{\overline p_{\rm T}}$) correlations; and \textit{strongly intensive:} $Σ_{\rm N_F N_B}$ quantity in symmetric pseudorapidity intervals, validated agai

Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

When Do LLM Agents Treat Surface Noise Differently from Semantic Noise? A 68-Cell Measurement Study with a Held-Out Trace-Level Validation

Liyun Zhang, Jiayi Guo · 2026 · arXiv

We document an empirical phenomenon in chain-of-thought and ReAct agents driven by ten large language models from seven architecture families: meaning-bearing perturbations (e.g., paraphrase, synonym) alter final answers more often than presentation perturbations (e.g., formatting, reordering) of comparable severity. Across 68 cells spanning GSM8K, MATH, and HotpotQA (1,530 originals and $\sim$11,150 variants), the inconsistency gap averages +19.69 pp after severity matching (paired $t=9.58$, $p<0.0001$), with 64/68 cells positive. The gap survives four severity-proxy audits and remains signif

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

Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Significant improvement of lossy compression rate and speed of HPC data using perceptron parallelized compression

Xinzhe Chen, Jianjiang Li · 2023 · arXiv

The escalating surge in data generation presents formidable challenges to information technology, necessitating advancements in storage, retrieval, and utilization. With the proliferation of artificial intelligence and big data, the "Data Age 2025" report forecasts an exponential increase in global data production. The escalating data volumes raise concerns about efficient data processing. The paper addresses the predicament of achieving a lower compression ratio while maintaining or surpassing the compression performance of state-of-the-art techniques. This paper introduces a lossy compressio

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Modified Bethe-Peierls boundary condition for ultracold atoms with Spin-Orbit coupling

Peng Zhang, Long Zhang, Youjin Deng · 2012 · arXiv

We show that the Bethe-Peierls (BP) boundary condition should be modified for ultracold atoms with spin-orbit (SO) coupling. Moreover, we derive a general form of the modified BP boundary condition, which is applicable to a system with arbitrary kind of SO coupling. In the modified BP condition, an anisotropic term appears and the inter-atomic scattering length is normally SO-coupling dependent. For the special system in the current experiments, however, it can be proved that the scattering length is SO-coupling independent, and takes the same value as in the case without SO coupling. Our resu

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Reflections from the 2024 Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry

Yoel Zimmermann, Adib Bazgir, Zartashia Afzal et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Here, we present the outcomes from the second Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry, which engaged participants across global hybrid locations, resulting in 34 team submissions. The submissions spanned seven key application areas and demonstrated the diverse utility of LLMs for applications in (1) molecular and material property prediction; (2) molecular and material design; (3) automation and novel interfaces; (4) scientific communication and education; (5) research data management and automation; (6) hypothesis generation and evaluation; and

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Measurement of total phase fluctuation in cold-atomic quantum simulators

Taufiq Murtadho, Federica Cataldini, Sebastian Erne et al. · 2024 · arXiv

Studying the dynamics of quantum many-body systems is often constrained by the limitations in probing relevant observables, especially in continuous systems. A powerful method to gain information about such systems is the reconstruction of local currents from the continuity equation. We show that this approach can be used to extract the total phase fluctuation of adjacent Bose gases. We validate our technique numerically and demonstrate its effectiveness by analyzing data from selected experiments simulating 1D quantum field theories through the phase difference of two parallel 1D Bose gases.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Influence of a Minimal Length on the Creation of Scalar Particles

S. Haouat, K. Nouicer · 2013 · arXiv

In this paper we have studied the problem of scalar particles pair creation by an electric field in the presence of a minimal length. Two sets of exact solutions for the Klein Gordon equation are given in momentum space. Then the canonical method based on Bogoliubov transformation connecting the "in" with the "out" states is applied to calculate the probability to create a pair of particles and the mean number of created particles. The number of created particles per unit of time per unit of length, which is related directly to the experimental measurements, is calculated. It is shown that, wi

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Spontaneous baryogenesis with large misalignment

Maxim Krasnov, Ufuk Aydemir, Maxim Khlopov · 2025 · arXiv

We investigate the particle production by the Nambu-Goldstone boson in the spontaneous baryogenesis scenario for large misalignment angles. Studying numerically the case of an arbitrary initial phase, we reproduce the cubic dependence on the initial value of the phase of baryon asymmetry in the case of small oscillations and present our results for an initial phase close to π. Our calculations indicate that there is a saturation in particle production as the initial phase approaches π in Minkowski spacetime. Furthermore, we present numerical solutions in the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Neutrino Indirect Detection of Neutralino Dark Matter in the CMSSM

V. Bertin, E. Nezri, J. Orloff · 2002 · arXiv

We study potential signals of neutralino dark matter indirect detection by neutrino telescopes in a wide range of CMSSM parameters. We also compare with direct detection potential signals taking into account in both cases present and future experiment sensitivities. Only models with neutralino annihilation into gauge bosons can satisfy cosmological constraints and current neutrino indirect detection sensitivities. For both direct and indirect detection, only next generation experiments will be able to really test this kind of models.

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 accessMathematics

Combinatorics of skew lines in $\mathbb P^3$ with an application to algebraic geometry

Luca Chiantini, Łucja Farnik, Giuseppe Favacchio et al. · 2023 · arXiv

This article introduces a previously unrecognized combinatorial structure underlying configurations of skew lines in $\mathbb{P}^3$, and reveals its deep and surprising connection to the algebro-geometric concept of geproci sets. Given any field $\mathbb{K}$ and a finite set $\mathcal L$ of 3 or more skew lines in $\mathbb{P}^3_\mathbb{K}$, we associate to it a group $G_{\mathcal L}$ and a groupoid $C_{\mathcal L}$ whose action on the union $\cup_{L\in\mathcal L}L$ provides orbits which have a rich combinatorial structure. We characterize when $G_{\mathcal L}$ is abelian and give partial resul

Failed Experiment ReportOpen accessComputer Science

When Good Components Go Bad: Formally Secure Compilation Despite Dynamic Compromise

Carmine Abate, Arthur Azevedo de Amorim, Roberto Blanco et al. · 2018 · arXiv

We propose a new formal criterion for evaluating secure compilation schemes for unsafe languages, expressing end-to-end security guarantees for software components that may become compromised after encountering undefined behavior---for example, by accessing an array out of bounds. Our criterion is the first to model dynamic compromise in a system of mutually distrustful components with clearly specified privileges. It articulates how each component should be protected from all the others---in particular, from components that have encountered undefined behavior and become compromised. Each comp

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Looking for a Handsome Carpenter! Debiasing GPT-3 Job Advertisements

Conrad Borchers, Dalia Sara Gala, Benjamin Gilburt et al. · 2022 · arXiv

The growing capability and availability of generative language models has enabled a wide range of new downstream tasks. Academic research has identified, quantified and mitigated biases present in language models but is rarely tailored to downstream tasks where wider impact on individuals and society can be felt. In this work, we leverage one popular generative language model, GPT-3, with the goal of writing unbiased and realistic job advertisements. We first assess the bias and realism of zero-shot generated advertisements and compare them to real-world advertisements. We then evaluate prompt

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

Style Over Substance: Evaluation Biases for Large Language Models

Minghao Wu, Alham Fikri Aji · 2023 · arXiv

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, accurately and comprehensively evaluating their performance becomes increasingly challenging. Ranking the relative performance of LLMs based on Elo ratings, according to human judgment, is gaining more popularity. However, the extent to which humans and LLMs are capable evaluators remains uncertain. This study investigates the behavior of crowd-sourced and expert annotators, as well as LLMs, when comparing outputs from different models. To achieve this, we curate a dataset of intentionally flawed machine-generated answers. Our findings revea

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Classical simulation of bosonic linear-optical random circuits beyond linear light cone

Changhun Oh, Youngrong Lim, Bill Fefferman et al. · 2021 · arXiv

Sampling from probability distributions of quantum circuits is a fundamentally and practically important task which can be used to demonstrate quantum supremacy using noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. In the present work, we examine classical simulability of sampling from the output photon-number distribution of linear-optical circuits composed of random beam splitters with equally distributed squeezed vacuum states and single-photon states input. We provide efficient classical algorithms to simulate linear-optical random circuits and show that the algorithms' error is exponentially sm

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences

Optimization and evaluation of a coarse-grained model of protein motion using X-ray crystal data

Dmitry A. Kondrashov, Qiang Cui, George N. Phillips · 2006 · arXiv

Simple coarse-grained models, such as the Gaussian Network Model, have been shown to capture some of the features of equilibrium protein dynamics. We extend this model by using atomic contacts to define residue interactions and introducing more than one interaction parameter between residues. We use B-factors from 98 ultra-high resolution X-ray crystal structures to optimize the interaction parameters. The average correlation between GNM fluctuation predictions and the B-factors is 0.64 for the data set, consistent with a previous large-scale study. By separating residue interactions into cova

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

The ATLAS discovery potential for a heavy charged Higgs boson in gg->tbH^{+-} with H^{+-}->tb

K. A. Assamagan, N. Gollub · 2004 · arXiv

The feasibility of detecting a heavy charged Higgs boson, m(H^{+-})>m(t)+m(b), decaying in the H^{+-}->tb channel is studied with the fast simulation of the ATLAS detector. We study the gg->H^{+-}tb production process at the LHC which together with the aforementioned decay channel leads to four b-quarks in the final state. The whole production and decay chain reads gg->H^{+-}tb->t\bar{t}b\bar{b}->b\bar{b}b\bar{b}lν\bar{q}q'. Combinatorial background is a major difficulty in this multi-jet environment but can be overcome by employing multivariate techniques in the event reconstruction. Requirin