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Related papers: How LLMs Follow Instructions: Skillful Coordinatio…

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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

Adhering to explicit length constraints, such as generating text with a precise word count, remains a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). This study aims at investigating the differences between foundation models and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Elisabetta Rocchetti , Alfio Ferrara

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has become a common approach for building models that can solve various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, where and to what extent these models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Zheng Zhao , Yftah Ziser , Shay B. Cohen

Despite widespread deployment of Large Language Models, systematic evaluation of instruction-following capabilities remains challenging. While comprehensive benchmarks exist, focused assessments that quickly diagnose specific instruction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Richard J. Young , Brandon Gillins , Alice M. Matthews

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

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

Skill composition is the ability to combine previously learned skills to solve new tasks. As neural networks acquire increasingly complex skills during their pretraining, it is not clear how successfully they can compose them. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Paula Ontalvilla , Aitor Ormazabal , Gorka Azkune

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

Traditional supervised learning mostly works on individual tasks and requires training on a large set of task-specific examples. This paradigm seriously hinders the development of task generalization since preparing a task-specific example…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Jiasheng Gu , Hongyu Zhao , Hanzi Xu , Liangyu Nie , Hongyuan Mei , Wenpeng Yin

Large language models (LLMs) are very performant connectionist systems, but do they exhibit more compositionality? More importantly, is that part of why they perform so well? We present empirical analyses across four LLM families (12…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Ruchira Dhar , Anders Søgaard

Instruction tuning is a widely used approach to improve the instruction-following ability of large language models (LLMs). Instruction-tuning datasets typically include a mixture of context-augmented and context-free examples, yet prior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Hyunji Lee , Seunghyun Yoon , Yunjae Won , Hanseok Oh , Geewook Kim , Trung Bui , Franck Dernoncourt , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal , Minjoon Seo

Curriculum learning (CL), motivated by the intuition that learning in increasing order of difficulty should ease generalization, is commonly adopted both in pre-training and post-training of large language models (LLMs). The intuition of CL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Maximilian Mordig , Andreas Opedal , Weiyang Liu , Bernhard Schölkopf

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with a collection of large and diverse instructions has improved the model's generalization to different tasks, even for unseen tasks. However, most existing instruction datasets include only single…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Shirley Anugrah Hayati , Taehee Jung , Tristan Bodding-Long , Sudipta Kar , Abhinav Sethy , Joo-Kyung Kim , Dongyeop Kang

Instruction tuning -- supervised fine-tuning using instruction-response pairs -- is a key step in making pre-trained large language models (LLMs) instructable. Meanwhile, LLMs perform multitask learning during their pre-training, acquiring…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Seokhyun An , Minji Kim , Hyounghun Kim

Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated promising capabilities in following simple instructions through instruction tuning. However, real-world tasks often involve complex, multi-step instructions that remain challenging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Abdulfattah Safa , Tamta Kapanadze , Arda Uzunoğlu , Gözde Gül Şahin

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, yet their deployment in enterprise environments reveals a critical limitation: inconsistent adherence to custom instructions.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Vishesh Tripathi , Uday Allu , Biddwan Ahmed

Instruction tuning of language models has demonstrated the ability to enhance model generalization to unseen tasks via in-context learning using a few examples. However, typical supervised learning still requires a plethora of downstream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Himanshu Gupta , Saurabh Arjun Sawant , Swaroop Mishra , Mutsumi Nakamura , Arindam Mitra , Santosh Mashetty , Chitta Baral

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

Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on a variety of tasks; however, generalizing from synthetic to human-authored instructions in grounded environments remains a challenge for them. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Chalamalasetti Kranti , Sherzod Hakimov , David Schlangen

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.…