Pith Number

pith:R4XXJIEG

pith:2026:R4XXJIEGPTYVIT32QY6VPKRYLS

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Which Reasoning Trajectories Teach Students to Reason Better? A Simple Metric of Informative Alignment

Chiyue Huang, Haijun Lv, Jian Tong, Jun Zhao, Mingqi Wu, Mingyoung Lai, Qipeng Guo, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Xuanjing Huang, Yicheng Zou, Yuming Yang, Yunhua Zhou, Zhiheng Xi

Rank-Surprisal Ratio identifies reasoning trajectories that best improve student model performance

arxiv:2601.14249 v5 · 2026-01-20 · cs.CL

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{R4XXJIEGPTYVIT32QY6VPKRYLS}

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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

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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

Across five student models and reasoning trajectories from 11 diverse teachers, RSR strongly correlates with post-training reasoning performance (average Spearman 0.86), consistently outperforming existing metrics.

C2weakest assumption

That the balance of low absolute probability and high relative rank under the student model genuinely indicates informativeness rather than an artifact of the tested models, tasks, or trajectory generation methods, and that this correlation will generalize beyond the five students and eleven teachers examined.

C3one line summary

Rank-Surprisal Ratio (RSR) correlates strongly (average Spearman 0.86) with post-distillation reasoning gains across five student models and trajectories from eleven teachers, outperforming existing selection metrics.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-26T02:04:03.266205Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

8f2f74a0867cf1544f7a863d57aa385c93404a161d9db04452c1e317dd1afcea

Aliases

arxiv: 2601.14249 · arxiv_version: 2601.14249v5 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2601.14249 · pith_short_12: R4XXJIEGPTYV · pith_short_16: R4XXJIEGPTYVIT32 · pith_short_8: R4XXJIEG

Agent API

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/R4XXJIEGPTYVIT32QY6VPKRYLS \
  | 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: 8f2f74a0867cf1544f7a863d57aa385c93404a161d9db04452c1e317dd1afcea

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "8908ccfe791646148cc75285abf1995b752c95d5f7e41352ab6c0dd37f76b4a3",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-01-20T18:58:10Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "b2637a3595c01475d3b4d5444fa2709ba1fd3a4e9e743a9a7a1e2f24391efed0"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2601.14249",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 5
  }
}