Pith Number

pith:IZLFCKOU

pith:2026:IZLFCKOURXF3CPLJXCFIVOG3U6

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

How to Steal Reasoning Without Reasoning Traces

John X. Morris, Tingwei Zhang, Vitaly Shmatikov

Trace inversion models recover detailed reasoning traces from only the inputs and final answers of black-box LLMs.

arxiv:2603.07267 v2 · 2026-03-07 · cs.CR

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{IZLFCKOURXF3CPLJXCFIVOG3U6}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

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

fine-tuning student models on inverted traces substantially improves their reasoning and enables distillation from proprietary, black-box LLMs.

C2weakest assumption

That synthetic traces generated without ground-truth reasoning are of high enough quality to transfer genuine reasoning improvements when used for fine-tuning.

C3one line summary

Trace inversion models reconstruct detailed reasoning traces from limited LLM outputs and enable effective distillation of reasoning capabilities from black-box models.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-18T03:10:03.490013Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

46565129d48dcbb13d69b88a8ab8dba78668afe90f3695aab41864c8b54bec16

Aliases

arxiv: 2603.07267 · arxiv_version: 2603.07267v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2603.07267 · pith_short_12: IZLFCKOURXF3 · pith_short_16: IZLFCKOURXF3CPLJ · pith_short_8: IZLFCKOU

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/IZLFCKOURXF3CPLJXCFIVOG3U6 \
  | 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: 46565129d48dcbb13d69b88a8ab8dba78668afe90f3695aab41864c8b54bec16

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "d6b7368ee99b4b71bfe0679bfdf862670eb5dd3615950925777a50017e50079b",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CR",
    "submitted_at": "2026-03-07T15:50:44Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "3011d1f601d3887f7b951b493f609c114cd1a2333951a9f2181ad924518d96d9"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2603.07267",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}