Pith Number

pith:34NRRF6J

pith:2026:34NRRF6JQXR7AKCWNPE3MURFO7

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What Structural Inductive Bias Helps Transformers Reason Over Knowledge Graphs? A Study with Tabula RASA

Camilla Mazzoleni, Federico Martelli, Gian-Alessandro Lombardi, Jonas Petersen, Riccardo Maggioni

Sparse adjacency masking alone supplies the main inductive bias that lets transformers perform multi-hop reasoning over knowledge graphs.

arxiv:2602.02834 v4 · 2026-02-02 · cs.LG · cs.AI

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\pithnumber{34NRRF6JQXR7AKCWNPE3MURFO7}

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2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

sparse adjacency masking alone accounts for the dominant share of improvement over unmasked transformers (+72.5pp on 3-hop MetaQA, +45.5pp on WebQSP, +53.9pp on CWQ)

C2weakest assumption

The four components can be removed independently without introducing implementation-specific interactions that confound the measured contributions of each.

C3one line summary

Sparse adjacency masking alone explains the bulk of transformer gains on multi-hop KGQA tasks, showing that topological structure matters far more than relation-specific parameters.

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-04T01:08:41.239297Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

df1b1897c985e3f028566bc9b6522577e68b9aa52b6e0e5f2dad0c07e052081e

Aliases

arxiv: 2602.02834 · arxiv_version: 2602.02834v4 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2602.02834 · pith_short_12: 34NRRF6JQXR7 · pith_short_16: 34NRRF6JQXR7AKCW · pith_short_8: 34NRRF6J

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/34NRRF6JQXR7AKCWNPE3MURFO7 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: df1b1897c985e3f028566bc9b6522577e68b9aa52b6e0e5f2dad0c07e052081e

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "bc1bdae5be0ae269d348759f2c9a2e5edead3ab5a3e9d8ee584711548d9440ea",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.LG",
    "submitted_at": "2026-02-02T21:35:39Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "f539b0ff6befa3b748f7856c7d562b37480cacef14bbcd62bd35b265551c1281"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2602.02834",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 4
  }
}