Pith Number

pith:ZTNOI2MA

pith:2026:ZTNOI2MA6LW5QXZ3TIFQ3UAGJT

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

The Model Says Walk: How Surface Heuristics Override Implicit Constraints in LLM Reasoning

Lu Zhang, Ramayya Krishnan, Rema Padman, Tianchong Jiang, Yubo Li

Surface distance cues override implicit feasibility constraints in large language models, causing systematic reasoning failures.

arxiv:2603.29025 v3 · 2026-03-30 · cs.CL · cs.AI

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{ZTNOI2MA6LW5QXZ3TIFQ3UAGJT}

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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

Causal-behavioral analysis of the car wash problem across six models reveals approximately context-independent sigmoid heuristics: the distance cue exerts 8.7 to 38 times more influence than the goal.

C2weakest assumption

That minimal pairs and explicitness gradients in the HOB benchmark successfully isolate heuristic override from other factors such as knowledge gaps or prompt formatting effects.

C3one line summary

LLMs prioritize surface heuristics such as distance cues over implicit constraints in reasoning tasks, with the new HOB benchmark showing no model exceeds 75% strict accuracy and hints recovering performance.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-10T01:11:00.301484Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

ccdae46980f2edd85f3b9a0b0dd0064cf33c03b7ca3b0baa4bf4f24a48b92c76

Aliases

arxiv: 2603.29025 · arxiv_version: 2603.29025v3 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2603.29025 · pith_short_12: ZTNOI2MA6LW5 · pith_short_16: ZTNOI2MA6LW5QXZ3 · pith_short_8: ZTNOI2MA

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/ZTNOI2MA6LW5QXZ3TIFQ3UAGJT \
  | 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: ccdae46980f2edd85f3b9a0b0dd0064cf33c03b7ca3b0baa4bf4f24a48b92c76

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "cea0c5463bbeb30c6ff2b5991a92f2f5a98170f80d935c0e485882b516924a57",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-03-30T21:36:09Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "8a1d9c502100298aa25330f6715b65790937ccf05d273e7a888216b72f0ca37e"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2603.29025",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 3
  }
}