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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

As large language model (LLM) based systems take on high-stakes roles in real-world decision-making, they must reconcile competing instructions from multiple sources (e.g., model developers, users, and tools) within a single prompt context.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Zishuo Zheng , Vidhisha Balachandran , Chan Young Park , Faeze Brahman , Sachin Kumar

Inspired by the exceptional general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have begun to explore their application in pioneering the next generation of recommender systems - systems that are conversational, explainable,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Wensheng Lu , Jianxun Lian , Wei Zhang , Guanghua Li , Mingyang Zhou , Hao Liao , Xing Xie

Large language models increasingly operate under multiple instructions from heterogeneous sources with different authority levels, including system policies, user requests, tool outputs, and retrieved context. While prior work on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Shu Yang , Zihao Zhou , Di Wang , Wenda Li

Given the impressive capabilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs), we investigate and benchmark the most popular proprietary and different sized open source models on the task of explicit instruction following in conflicting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Edward Kim

Despite the fact that large language models (LLMs) show exceptional skill in instruction following tasks, this strength can turn into a vulnerability when the models are required to disregard certain instructions. Instruction-following…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Yerin Hwang , Yongil Kim , Jahyun Koo , Taegwan Kang , Hyunkyung Bae , Kyomin Jung

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

The instruction hierarchy, which establishes a priority order from system messages to user messages, conversation history, and tool outputs, is essential for ensuring consistent and safe behavior in language models (LMs). Despite its…

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly power conversational agents, understanding how they model users' emotional states is critical for ethical deployment. Inspired by emotion wheels -- a psychological framework that argues emotions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Bo Zhao , Maya Okawa , Eric J. Bigelow , Rose Yu , Tomer Ullman , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Hidenori Tanaka

System prompts in Large Language Models (LLMs) are predefined directives that guide model behaviour, taking precedence over user inputs in text processing and generation. LLM deployers increasingly use them to ensure consistent responses…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Anna Neumann , Elisabeth Kirsten , Muhammad Bilal Zafar , Jatinder Singh

Despite large language models' (LLMs) recent advancements, their bias and hallucination issues persist, and their ability to offer consistent preferential rankings remains underexplored. This study investigates the capacity of LLMs to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Xiutian Zhao , Ke Wang , Wei Peng

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

Language models deployed in high-stakes professional settings face conflicting demands from users, institutional authorities, and professional norms. How models act when these demands conflict reveals a principal hierarchy -- an implicit…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Fangyi Yu , Nabeel Seedat , Jonathan Richard Schwarz , Andrew M. Bean

Large language models should follow hierarchical instructions where system prompts override user inputs, yet recent work shows they often ignore this rule while strongly obeying social cues such as authority or consensus. We extend these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Siqi Zeng

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions has become a critical task for safely deploying models in real-world systems. While existing alignment approaches have seen empirical success, theoretically understanding how these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Shawn Im , Yixuan Li

Large language models (LLMs) have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses. Nevertheless, their robustness is still far from optimal, as they may generate significantly inconsistent responses…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Yukun Zhao , Lingyong Yan , Weiwei Sun , Guoliang Xing , Shuaiqiang Wang , Chong Meng , Zhicong Cheng , Zhaochun Ren , Dawei Yin

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in environments where they encounter social information such as other agents' answers, tool outputs, or human recommendations. In humans, such inputs influence judgments in ways that depend…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anooshka Bajaj , Zoran Tiganj

How do LLMs decide what to teach next: by reasoning about a learner's knowledge, or by using simpler rules of thumb? We test this in a controlled task previously used to study human teaching strategies. On each trial, a teacher LLM sees a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Sevan K. Harootonian , Mark K. Ho , Thomas L. Griffiths , Yael Niv , Ilia Sucholutsky

Large language models (LLMs) could be valuable personal AI agents across various domains, provided they can precisely follow user instructions. However, recent studies have shown significant limitations in LLMs' instruction-following…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Juyeon Heo , Miao Xiong , Christina Heinze-Deml , Jaya Narain

Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to security and safety threats, such as prompt injection, prompt extraction, and harmful requests. One major cause of these vulnerabilities is the lack of an instruction hierarchy. Modern LLM…

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