Pith Number

pith:QQOZKIIK

pith:2026:QQOZKIIK7JDYU56SK3UVWY34DT

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Learning to Decipher from Pixels: A Case Study of Copiale

Alicia Forn\'es, Be\'ata Megyesi, Giuseppe De Gregorio, Lei Kang, Raphaela Heil

A neural model can map handwritten cipher images directly to plaintext without first transcribing the symbols.

arxiv:2604.23683 v2 · 2026-04-26 · cs.CV

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

Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{QQOZKIIK7JDYU56SK3UVWY34DT}

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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

Our results demonstrate that transcription-free image-to-plaintext decipherment is both feasible and effective for historical substitution ciphers, offering a simplified and scalable alternative to traditional pipelines.

C2weakest assumption

The method assumes that a model pretrained on generic handwriting data can be effectively fine-tuned on a limited cipher-specific dataset to learn the direct visual-to-plaintext mapping without needing explicit symbol-level transcription or additional cryptanalytic constraints.

C3one line summary

An end-to-end neural network deciphers the Copiale cipher directly from line-level images to German plaintext without any transcription step, using pretraining on generic handwriting followed by cipher-specific fine-tuning.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-07-01T01:17:51.321613Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

841d95210afa478a77d256e95b637c1cebf67fde69e84c34aac6a9fb88dce98c

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.23683 · arxiv_version: 2604.23683v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.23683 · pith_short_12: QQOZKIIK7JDY · pith_short_16: QQOZKIIK7JDYU56S · pith_short_8: QQOZKIIK

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/QQOZKIIK7JDYU56SK3UVWY34DT \
  | 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: 841d95210afa478a77d256e95b637c1cebf67fde69e84c34aac6a9fb88dce98c

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "8fa5512eb77bf00e2f7a6b1ee414c9a9515539c76298d2f2f0c5959c80df7168",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CV",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-26T12:51:41Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "c8f48e2892aa00d40c95b83d207193cd35c094aa12d5821eeffccb8844969631"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.23683",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}