Related papers: Reasoning Up the Instruction Ladder for Controllab…

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…

Instruction hierarchy (IH) defines how LLMs prioritize system, developer, user, and tool instructions under conflict, providing a concrete, trust-ordered policy for resolving instruction conflicts. IH is key to defending against jailbreaks,…

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…

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow user instructions is central to their reliability, safety, and usefulness. While prior studies assess instruction adherence in the model's main responses, we argue that it is also…

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…

Instruction-following is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user intent. While recent reasoning-oriented models exhibit impressive performance on complex mathematical problems, their ability to adhere to natural…

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…

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…

Existing large language models (LLMs) face challenges of following complex instructions, especially when multiple constraints are present and organized in paralleling, chaining, and branching structures. One intuitive solution, namely…

Evaluating the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in following instructions has heavily relied on a powerful LLM as the judge, introducing unresolved biases that deviate the judgments from human judges. In this work, we reevaluate…

Large language model agents receive instructions from many sources-system messages, user prompts, tool outputs, other agents, and more-each carrying different levels of trust and authority. When these instructions conflict, agents must…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in instruction-following, becoming increasingly crucial across various applications. However, this capability brings with it the risk of prompt injection attacks, where…

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (LLMs) explicitly generate intermediate reasoning steps prior to generating final answers, helping the model excel in complex problem-solving. In this paper, we demonstrate that this emerging…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

As applications of large language models (LLMs) become increasingly complex, the demand for robust complex instruction following capabilities is growing accordingly. We argue that a thorough understanding of the instruction itself,…

Reinforcement learning has seen wide success in finetuning large language models to better align with instructions via human feedback. The so-called algorithm, Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) demonstrates impressive…

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for addressing a wide range of general inquiries and tasks. Despite this, fine-tuning aligned LLMs on smaller, domain-specific datasets, critical to adapting them to specialized…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across various NLP benchmarks. However, excelling in complex tasks that require nuanced reasoning and precise decision-making demands more than raw language proficiency--LLMs…

Modern Language Models (LMs) are capable of following long and complex instructions that enable a large and diverse set of user requests. While Information Retrieval (IR) models use these LMs as the backbone of their architectures,…