Pith Number

pith:YQHAX3G6

pith:2026:YQHAX3G6ZX6EBHIMC76ICVUKSC

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Shepherd: A Runtime Substrate Empowering Meta-Agents with a Formalized Execution Trace

Ananjan Nandi, Christopher D Manning, Derek Chong, Dilara Soylu, Jiuding Sun, Simon Yu, Weiyan Shi

Shepherd formalizes meta-agent operations as functions on a Git-like execution trace that records every interaction for fast forking and replay.

arxiv:2605.10913 v2 · 2026-05-11 · cs.AI · cs.PL · cs.SE

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{YQHAX3G6ZX6EBHIMC76ICVUKSC}

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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

These results establish Shepherd as an efficient infrastructure for programming meta-agents.

C2weakest assumption

The reported performance gains in runtime intervention, counterfactual optimization, and Tree-RL training are attributable to Shepherd's execution trace and forking features rather than unstated experimental factors.

C3one line summary

Shepherd is a runtime system that formalizes meta-agent operations via typed execution traces, enabling fast forking and demonstrated improvements in agent intervention, optimization, and training on benchmarks.

Formal links

1 machine-checked theorem link

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-26T02:05:10.345279Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

c40e0becdecdfc409d0c17fc81568a909cd036435d11b860ba0718823d90f827

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.10913 · arxiv_version: 2605.10913v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.10913 · pith_short_12: YQHAX3G6ZX6E · pith_short_16: YQHAX3G6ZX6EBHIM · pith_short_8: YQHAX3G6

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/YQHAX3G6ZX6EBHIMC76ICVUKSC \
  | 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: c40e0becdecdfc409d0c17fc81568a909cd036435d11b860ba0718823d90f827

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "29bdb3a7d259864a973363d23fd598a091c5dc6647c42c2c9f168f44508d9368",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.PL",
      "cs.SE"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.AI",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-11T17:50:51Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "6fc3268d87e459f37de08123fcfdc086dd70475371d06456e3b5b0fa1b61f785"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.10913",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}