The Hidden Signal of Verifier Strictness: Controlling and Improving Step-Wise Verification via Selective Latent Steering
The paper discusses the concept of verifier strictness in generative verifiers used for step-wise verification. It introduces a method called VerifySteer, which controls verifier strictness through hidden-state intervention. The results indicate that VerifySteer outperforms existing methods while requiring significantly less computational resources.
- ▪Generative verifiers can be either under-critical or over-critical in their verification behavior.
- ▪The study reveals a hidden-state signal that can modulate verifier strictness without fine-tuning.
- ▪VerifySteer selectively intervenes on paragraph boundaries and shows improved performance over traditional methods.
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Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2605.20745 (cs) [Submitted on 20 May 2026] Title:The Hidden Signal of Verifier Strictness: Controlling and Improving Step-Wise Verification via Selective Latent Steering Authors:Yefan Zhou, Yilun Zhou, Austin Xu, Soroush Vosoughi, Shafiq Joty, Jiang Gui View a PDF of the paper titled The Hidden Signal of Verifier Strictness: Controlling and Improving Step-Wise Verification via Selective Latent Steering, by Yefan Zhou and 5 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: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.
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