The Hidden Signal of Verifier Strictness: Controlling and Improving Step-Wise Verification via Selective Latent Steering
Generative verifiers have emerged as a promising paradigm for step-wise verification, but their verification behavior is often poorly calibrated: they may be under-critical and miss erroneous steps, or over-critical and reject correct reasoning. We refer to this tendency to be overly lenient or overly critical as verifier strictness. In this work, we study whether verifier strictness can be controlled through hidden-state intervention. We uncover a verification-specific hidden-state signal: in step-wise verification, a verifier's tendency to accept or reject a solution step is encoded near the boundary of the corresponding verification paragraph. Exploiting this signal, we show that hidde...
| Authors | Yefan Zhou, Yilun Zhou, Austin Xu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 20 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 May 2026 |
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