Related papers: Boosting Instruction Following at Scale

Calibration, the alignment between model confidence and prediction accuracy, is critical for the reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs). Existing works neglect to measure the generalization of their methods to other prompt…

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies heavily on the quality of prompts, which are often manually engineered and task-specific, making them costly and non-scalable. We propose a novel approach, Supervisory Prompt Training…

Background and Context. The increasing integration of large language models (LLMs) in computing education presents an emerging challenge in understanding how students use LLMs and craft prompts to solve computational tasks. Prior research…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance and have come to dominate the field of natural language processing (NLP) across various tasks. However, due to their strong instruction-following capabilities and…

In this paper, we introduce the Instruction Following Score (IFS), a metric that detects language models' ability to follow instructions. The metric has a dual purpose. First, IFS can be used to distinguish between base and instruct models.…

We study how prompt-level inductive biases influence the cognitive behavior of large language models (LLMs) in instructional dialogue. We introduce a symbolic scaffolding method paired with a short-term memory schema designed to promote…

Large language models excel at complex instructions yet struggle to deviate from their helpful assistant persona, as post-training instills strong priors that resist conflicting instructions. We introduce system prompt strength, a…

Small language models (SLMs) enable low-cost, private, on-device inference, but they often fail on problems that require specialized domain knowledge or multi-step reasoning. Existing approaches for improving reasoning either rely on scale…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in code generation tasks and have become indispensable programming assistants for developers. However, existing code generation benchmarks primarily assess the…

Behavioral analysis of tutoring dialogues is essential for understanding student learning, yet manual coding remains a bottleneck. We present a methodology where LLM coding agents autonomously improve the prompts used by LLM classifiers to…

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…

Today's generative AI systems are tuned to present information by default, rather than engage users in service of learning as a human tutor would. To address the wide range of potential education use cases for these systems, we reframe the…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to empirically improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on various question answering tasks. While understanding why CoT prompting is effective is crucial to ensuring that this…

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for open-ended tasks, but underspecified prompts can lead to low-quality answers and additional interaction. This paper studies whether structured prompt design improves response quality while…

Consistency is a fundamental dimension of trustworthiness in Large Language Models (LLMs). For humans to be able to trust LLM-based applications, their outputs should be consistent when prompted with inputs that carry the same meaning or…

Instruction tuning is crucial for enabling Language Learning Models (LLMs) in responding to human instructions. The quality of instruction pairs used for tuning greatly affects the performance of LLMs. However, the manual creation of…

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping software development as developers integrate these LLMs into their applications. In such applications, prompts serve as the primary means of interacting with LLMs. Despite the…

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…

Large Language Models, particularly decoder-only generative models such as GPT, are increasingly used to automate Software Engineering tasks. These models are primarily guided through natural language prompts, making prompt engineering a…

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising…