Pith Number

pith:6MH7MKDC

pith:2026:6MH7MKDCHCHFJVE6JPF2O7H6CX

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

The Query Channel: Information-Theoretic Limits of Masking-Based Explanations

Erciyes Karakaya, Ozgur Ercetin

Masking-based explanations can be recovered reliably only when their rate stays below the query channel's identification capacity.

arxiv:2604.16689 v2 · 2026-04-17 · cs.AI

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{6MH7MKDCHCHFJVE6JPF2O7H6CX}

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Record completeness

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2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

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

We derive a strong converse showing that, if the explanation rate exceeds this capacity, the probability of exact recovery necessarily converges to one in error for any sequence of explainers and decoders. We also prove an achievability result establishing that a sparse maximum-likelihood decoder attains reliable recovery when the rate lies below capacity.

C2weakest assumption

The query channel model assumes that randomized masking perturbations supply information at a well-defined identification capacity per query that is independent enough of the specific black-box to allow the strong converse to apply uniformly across explainers.

C3one line summary

Masking-based explanations are governed by the information capacity of the query channel, with reliable recovery achievable below capacity via sparse maximum-likelihood decoding but impossible above it.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-12T01:08:24.765894Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

f30ff62862388e54d49e4bcba77cfe15fe02bd29030e6d18a289593546824049

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.16689 · arxiv_version: 2604.16689v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.16689 · pith_short_12: 6MH7MKDCHCHF · pith_short_16: 6MH7MKDCHCHFJVE6 · pith_short_8: 6MH7MKDC

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/6MH7MKDCHCHFJVE6JPF2O7H6CX \
  | 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: f30ff62862388e54d49e4bcba77cfe15fe02bd29030e6d18a289593546824049

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "1e9d3d0bed2f6f4ac316265cd3dd50200faa8609dd1e5ca7e8bbf32a763d0990",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.AI",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-17T20:46:25Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "433d65ec197416f91d501ba670b12b80a9ab77ccfdaebea182f23e58f322103a"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.16689",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}