CLUE: Non-parametric Verification from Experience via Hidden-State Clustering

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01591v1
• Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2025 02:14:33 GMT
• Title: CLUE: Non-parametric Verification from Experience via Hidden-State Clustering
• Authors: Zhenwen Liang, Ruosen Li, Yujun Zhou, Linfeng Song, Dian Yu, Xinya Du, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu,
• Abstract summary: We show that correctness of a solution is encoded as a geometrically separable signature within the trajectory of hidden activations.<n>ClUE consistently outperforms LLM-as-a-judge baselines and matches or exceeds modern confidence-based methods in reranking candidates.
• Score: 64.50919789875233
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Assessing the quality of Large Language Model (LLM) outputs presents a critical challenge. Previous methods either rely on text-level information (e.g., reward models, majority voting), which can overfit to superficial cues, or on calibrated confidence from token probabilities, which would fail on less-calibrated models. Yet both of these signals are, in fact, partial projections of a richer source of information: the model's internal hidden states. Early layers, closer to token embeddings, preserve semantic and lexical features that underpin text-based judgments, while later layers increasingly align with output logits, embedding confidence-related information. This paper explores hidden states directly as a unified foundation for verification. We show that the correctness of a solution is encoded as a geometrically separable signature within the trajectory of hidden activations. To validate this, we present Clue (Clustering and Experience-based Verification), a deliberately minimalist, non-parametric verifier. With no trainable parameters, CLUE only summarizes each reasoning trace by an hidden state delta and classifies correctness via nearest-centroid distance to ``success'' and ``failure'' clusters formed from past experience. The simplicity of this method highlights the strength of the underlying signal. Empirically, CLUE consistently outperforms LLM-as-a-judge baselines and matches or exceeds modern confidence-based methods in reranking candidates, improving both top-1 and majority-vote accuracy across AIME 24/25 and GPQA. As a highlight, on AIME 24 with a 1.5B model, CLUE boosts accuracy from 56.7% (majority@64) to 70.0% (top-maj@16).

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