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

ArXi:2605.20745v1 Announce Type: new 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.