Trust but Verify: Prover-Verifier Deliberation for Selective LLM Prediction
Reliably knowing when a language model is correct is almost as important as being correct. We introduce prover-verifier deliberation (PVD), an inference-time protocol grounded in interactive proof theory, as a mechanism for selective prediction: the protocol produces both an answer and a structured confidence verdict, allowing a system to report high-confidence answers while abstaining on uncertain cases. In each dialogue, a prover defends a candidate answer through checkable sub-claims while a verifier issues targeted challenges and returns \textsc{Accept}, \textsc{Challenge}, or \textsc{Reject}. Because frozen language models are imperfect provers and verifiers operating over a noisy ch...
| Authors | João Sedoc, Baotong Zhang, Dean Foster |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 24 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 May 2026 |
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