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Beaver: An Efficient Deterministic LLM Verifier (arxiv.org)
1 point by tshanmu 292 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: Instead of randomly sampling outputs, it walks the tree of possible replies, keeping guaranteed limits on how often a model breaks a safety rule. It flagged 2–3 times more risky cases than sampling checks while using a tenth of the compute.

Abstract · BEAVER: An Efficient Deterministic LLM Verifier

As large language models (LLMs) transition from research prototypes to production systems, practitioners often need reliable methods to verify model outputs and characterize tail risk for safe deployment. While sampling-based estimates provide an ad-hoc intuition of model behavior, they offer no sound guarantees. We present BEAVER, the first practical framework for computing deterministic, sound probability bounds on LLM satisfaction of safety properties. Given a prompt & any safety property, BEAVER systematically explores the model output space using novel Token trie and Frontier data structures, maintaining provably sound bounds at every iteration. We formalize the verification problem, prove soundness of our approach, and evaluate BEAVER on 4 safety properties across 12 open-weight LLMs. BEAVER identifies 2-3x more risky instances compared to baselines while taking 1/10 of the compute budget, surfacing tail risks that loose bounds and ad-hoc evaluation misses.

Tarun Suresh, Nalin Wadhwa, Debangshu Banerjee, Gagandeep Singh
arXiv:2512.05439 · cs.AI, cs.FL · submitted Dec 5, 2025 · updated May 7, 2026
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As large language models (LLMs) transition from research prototypes to production systems, practitioners often need reliable methods to verify that model outputs satisfy required constraints. While sampling-based estimates provide an intuition of model behavior, they offer no sound guarantees. We present BEAVER, the first practical framework for computing deterministic, sound probability bounds on LLM constraint satisfaction. Given any prefix-closed semantic constraint, BEAVER systematically explores the generation space using novel token trie and frontier data structures, maintaining provably sound bounds at every iteration. We formalize the verification problem, prove soundness of our approach, and evaluate BEAVER on correctness verification, privacy verification and secure code generation tasks across multiple state of the art LLMs. BEAVER achieves 6 to 8 times tighter probability bounds and identifies 3 to 4 times more high risk instances compared to baseline methods under identical computational budgets, enabling precise characterization and risk assessment that loose bounds or empirical evaluation cannot provide.