arXiv:2605.20745cs.LGcs.AI2026-05被引 4

通过调控隐藏状态,精准控制推理验证的严格程度。

The Hidden Signal of Verifier Strictness: Controlling and Improving Step-Wise Verification via Selective Latent Steering

论文配图:The Hidden Signal of Verifier Strictness: Controlling and Improving Step-Wise Verification via Selective Latent Steering
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 在验证段落边界发现可调控的隐状态信号
  • 实现无需微调的严格性调节,提升错误检测率23.6%
  • 适合需要高效、可控验证的推理系统部署

生成式验证器在分步验证中表现潜力巨大,但其验证行为常缺乏校准:可能过于宽松而遗漏错误步骤,或过于严格而否决正确推理。我们将这种倾向称为验证器严格性。本文研究是否可通过隐藏状态干预来控制严格性。我们发现,在分步验证中,验证器接受或拒绝某个解题步骤的倾向,编码在对应验证段落的边界附近。利用该信号,我们证明隐藏状态引导可直接调节验证严格性,无需微调。然而,统一引导会带来错误检测与正确性认证之间的权衡。为此,我们提出VerifySteer,通过潜在正确性信号实现样本级路由,并仅在段落边界选择性干预。在ProcessBench和Hard2Verify上的实验表明,VerifySteer优于提示优化和激活引导基线,且在性能上媲美自洽性方法,但推理计算量减少4-7倍。VerifySteer还与验证微调互补,在微调验证器基础上进一步提升性能。代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

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 hidden-state steering can directly modulate verifier strictness without fine-tuning. However, uniform steering induces a trade-off between error detection and correctness certification. To address this, we propose VerifySteer, which exploits latent correctness signals for sample-level routing and selectively intervenes on paragraph boundaries. Experiments on ProcessBench and Hard2Verify show that VerifySteer outperforms prompt optimization and activation steering baselines, and is competitive with self-consistency while requiring 4-7x less inference compute. VerifySteer is also complementary to verification fine-tuning, providing further gains on top of fine-tuned verifiers. The code is available at https://github.com/YefanZhou/VerifySteer.

验证器隐状态推理控制高效验证

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