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Related papers: Following Length Constraints in Instructions

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Language models are trained to follow instructions, but they are also powerful pattern completers. What happens when these two objectives conflict? We construct conversations in which a user instruction to behave in a target way T (e.g.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Carolina Camassa , Derek Shiller

Instruction following is a critical ability for Large Language Models to perform downstream tasks. The standard approach to instruction tuning has relied on a specific phase of supervised fine-tuning over curated instruction datasets,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-01 David Ponce , Thierry Etchegoyhen

Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) elicits instruction following capabilities and steers the behavior of large language models (LLMs) via supervised learning. However, existing models trained on open-source IFT datasets only have the ability to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Kuan Wang , Alexander Bukharin , Haoming Jiang , Qingyu Yin , Zhengyang Wang , Tuo Zhao , Jingbo Shang , Chao Zhang , Bing Yin , Xian Li , Jianshu Chen , Shiyang Li

Real-world instructions with multiple constraints pose a significant challenge to existing large language models (LLMs). An observation is that the LLMs exhibit dramatic performance fluctuation when disturbing the order of the incorporated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Jie Zeng , Qianyu He , Qingyu Ren , Jiaqing Liang , Yanghua Xiao , Weikang Zhou , Zeye Sun , Fei Yu

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with hierarchical instruction schemes, where certain instructions (e.g., system-level directives) are expected to take precedence over others (e.g., user messages). Yet, we lack a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yilin Geng , Haonan Li , Honglin Mu , Xudong Han , Timothy Baldwin , Omri Abend , Eduard Hovy , Lea Frermann

Length control in Large Language Models (LLMs) is a crucial but under-addressed challenge, with applications ranging from voice interfaces requiring concise responses to research summaries needing comprehensive outputs. Current approaches…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Adewale Akinfaderin , Shreyas Subramanian , Akarsha Sehwag

Despite significant achievements in improving the instruction-following capabilities of large language models (LLMs), the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge.…

Today's LLMs are susceptible to prompt injections, jailbreaks, and other attacks that allow adversaries to overwrite a model's original instructions with their own malicious prompts. In this work, we argue that one of the primary…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Eric Wallace , Kai Xiao , Reimar Leike , Lilian Weng , Johannes Heidecke , Alex Beutel

Complex, long-horizon planning and its combinatorial nature pose steep challenges for learning-based agents. Difficulties in such settings are exacerbated in low data regimes where over-fitting stifles generalization and compounding errors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Joey Hejna , Pieter Abbeel , Lerrel Pinto

In many real-world applications, users rely on natural language instructions to guide large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. These instructions are often complex, diverse, and subject to frequent change. However, LLMs do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Praveen Venkateswaran , Danish Contractor

Instruction following is one of the fundamental capabilities of large language models (LLMs). As the ability of LLMs is constantly improving, they have been increasingly applied to deal with complex human instructions in real-world…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Bosi Wen , Pei Ke , Xiaotao Gu , Lindong Wu , Hao Huang , Jinfeng Zhou , Wenchuang Li , Binxin Hu , Wendy Gao , Jiaxin Xu , Yiming Liu , Jie Tang , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

Despite the success of Instruction Tuning (IT) in training large language models (LLMs), such models often leverage spurious or biased features learnt from their training data and can become misaligned, leading to undesired behaviours.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tom A. Lamb , Adam Davies , Alasdair Paren , Philip H. S. Torr , Francesco Pinto

Instruction tuning plays a crucial role in shaping the outputs of language models (LMs) to desired styles. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective method, Instruction Modelling (IM), which trains LMs by applying a loss function to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Zhengyan Shi , Adam X. Yang , Bin Wu , Laurence Aitchison , Emine Yilmaz , Aldo Lipani

Instruction following aims to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent by specifying explicit constraints on how tasks should be performed. However, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: instruction following can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yunjia Qi , Hao Peng , Xintong Shi , Amy Xin , Xiaozhi Wang , Bin Xu , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

It is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions that involve multiple constraints. However, it is an unexplored area to enhance LLMs' ability to follow soft constraints. To bridge the gap, we initially design a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qingyu Ren , Jie Zeng , Qianyu He , Jiaqing Liang , Yanghua Xiao , Weikang Zhou , Zeye Sun , Fei Yu

Instruction tuning is commonly assumed to endow language models with a domain-general ability to follow instructions, yet the underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. Does instruction-following rely on a universal mechanism or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Elisabetta Rocchetti , Alfio Ferrara

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have demonstrated remarkable abilities across diverse tasks, especially as they are scaled up. Nevertheless, even state-of-the-art models struggle in certain cases,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Irina Bigoulaeva , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across various benchmark tasks. While providing instructions to LLMs for guiding their generations is user-friendly, assessing their instruction-following…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Rem Hida , Junki Ohmura , Toshiyuki Sekiya

Language model-based instruction-following systems have lately shown increasing performance on many benchmark tasks, demonstrating the capability of adapting to a broad variety of instructions. However, such systems are often not designed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-20 Rahul Nadkarni , Yizhong Wang , Noah A. Smith

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, where instruction tuning is the critical step in aligning LLMs with user intentions. In this work, we investigate how the instruction tuning adjusts pre-trained models with a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Xuansheng Wu , Wenlin Yao , Jianshu Chen , Xiaoman Pan , Xiaoyang Wang , Ninghao Liu , Dong Yu