Partially Correlated Verifier Cascades in LLM Harnesses: Concave Log-Odds, Polynomial Reliability, and Blind-Spot Ceilings

arXiv:2607.13918v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Serial verification gates are a core reliability primitive in LLM harnesses: a candidate answer is returned only if k verifier calls all accept it. Under conditionally independent gates, the recent Odds Law (arXiv:2606.15712) shows that posterior log-odds grow linearly in k, so failure decays exponentially, and states that "a tight theory of partially correlated verifier cascades remains open." This note gives a minimal such theory. Modeling the per-instance false-accept rate on the generator's own errors as a latent variable alpha sim G (de Finetti), the exact cascade posterior is ell_k = ell_0 - ln m_k, with m_k the k-th moment of G. Then: (i) ell_k is concave in k for every non-degenerate G -- the Odds Law is its tangent at the first gate and an upper bound; (ii) for Beta(a,b) latents, failure decays polynomially, 1-r_k asymp k^{-b}, with correlation parameter rho_v = 1/(a+b+1); (iii) a blind-spot atom of mass 1-pi at alpha=1 caps the evidence extractable from any number of gates at -ln(1-pi) nats, so reliability saturates below 1; (iv) letting the true-accept rate also vary (eta sim H) yields a trichotomy -- gates eventually always help, plateau, or actively harm -- decided by the upper-tail exponents of G and H, with closed-form crossover k^agger. The mechanism is survivorship: errors surviving gates are the high-alpha ones. The theory is measurable: R repeated verdicts per instance identify the first R moments of G, so two verdicts identify rho_v; beta-binomial likelihood and NPMLE recover the reliability curve and the ill-posed ceiling. In synthetic tests, independence-based extrapolation underestimates failure by 20x at k=5 and ~3000x at k=10; the correlated fit at R=8 tracks held-out depths. The practical lever is decorrelation -- changing model family, modality, or evidence source -- not adding gates.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-07-16