Pith Number

pith:QLHBVG2K

pith:2026:QLHBVG2KR6XPVMHMJDOZVZQIRD

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Answer Only as Precisely as Justified: Calibrated Claim-Level Specificity Control for Agentic Systems

Jason Tansong Dang, Kimberley Yin, Samuel Xu, Samuel Yan, Tianyi Huang

Compositional selective specificity calibrates each claim to the most specific level supported by evidence.

arxiv:2604.17487 v2 · 2026-04-19 · cs.CL

Open paper page JSON Open Graph Bundle Merged state Verified badge What is a Pith Number?

Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{QLHBVG2KR6XPVMHMJDOZVZQIRD}

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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

Across a full LongFact run and HotpotQA pilots, calibrated CSS improves the risk-utility trade-off of fixed drafts. On the full LongFact run, it raises overcommitment-aware utility from 0.846 to 0.913 relative to the no-CSS output while achieving 0.938 specificity retention.

C2weakest assumption

That automated claim decomposition and backoff proposal can reliably identify which parts of a response exceed the evidence without introducing new inaccuracies or losing critical context.

C3one line summary

Compositional selective specificity (CSS) improves overcommitment-aware utility from 0.846 to 0.913 on LongFact while retaining 0.938 specificity by calibrating claim-level backoffs in agentic AI responses.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:04:31.974207Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

82ce1a9b4a8faefab0ec48dd9ae60888e92bd215fe4cb112975947bec3d002c6

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.17487 · arxiv_version: 2604.17487v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.17487 · pith_short_12: QLHBVG2KR6XP · pith_short_16: QLHBVG2KR6XPVMHM · pith_short_8: QLHBVG2K

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/QLHBVG2KR6XPVMHMJDOZVZQIRD \
  | 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: 82ce1a9b4a8faefab0ec48dd9ae60888e92bd215fe4cb112975947bec3d002c6

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "d4a43b8c3582981ec8e1af52598af73f7ecfec553ed06fa72a8141b263cc4a04",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-19T15:20:02Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "cc88b13115c7162b2b903bd8acccb0c863cdc1e6d540546926d46cbe0305cf88"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.17487",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}