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Main Authors: Wang, Chenyang, Wen, Liang, Jia, Shousheng, Zhang, Xiangzheng, Xu, Liang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03178
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author Wang, Chenyang
Wen, Liang
Jia, Shousheng
Zhang, Xiangzheng
Xu, Liang
author_facet Wang, Chenyang
Wen, Liang
Jia, Shousheng
Zhang, Xiangzheng
Xu, Liang
contents While advancements in the reasoning abilities of LLMs have significantly enhanced their performance in solving mathematical problems, coding tasks, and general puzzles, their effectiveness in accurately adhering to instructions remains inconsistent, particularly with more complex directives. Our investigation identifies lazy reasoning during the thinking stage as the primary factor contributing to poor instruction adherence. To mitigate this issue, we propose a comprehensive framework designed to enable rigorous reasoning processes involving preview and self-checking, essential for satisfying strict instruction constraints. Specifically, we first generate instructions with complex constraints and apply a filtering process to obtain valid prompts, resulting in three distinct prompt datasets categorized as hard, easy, and pass. Then, we employ rejection sampling on the pass prompts to curate a small yet high-quality dataset, enabling a cold-start initialization of the model and facilitating its adaptation to effective reasoning patterns. Subsequently, we employ an entropy-preserving supervised fine-tuning (Entropy-SFT) strategy coupled with token-wise entropy-adaptive (TEA-RL) reinforcement learning guided by rule-based dense rewards. This approach encourages the model to transform its reasoning mechanism, ultimately fostering generalizable reasoning abilities that encompass preview and self-checking. Extensive experiments conducted on instruction-following benchmarks demonstrate remarkable performance improvements across various model scales. Notably, our Light-IF-32B model surpasses both larger open-source models such as DeepSeek-R1 and closed-source models like Doubao-1.6.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_03178
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Light-IF: Endowing LLMs with Generalizable Reasoning via Preview and Self-Checking for Complex Instruction Following
Wang, Chenyang
Wen, Liang
Jia, Shousheng
Zhang, Xiangzheng
Xu, Liang
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
While advancements in the reasoning abilities of LLMs have significantly enhanced their performance in solving mathematical problems, coding tasks, and general puzzles, their effectiveness in accurately adhering to instructions remains inconsistent, particularly with more complex directives. Our investigation identifies lazy reasoning during the thinking stage as the primary factor contributing to poor instruction adherence. To mitigate this issue, we propose a comprehensive framework designed to enable rigorous reasoning processes involving preview and self-checking, essential for satisfying strict instruction constraints. Specifically, we first generate instructions with complex constraints and apply a filtering process to obtain valid prompts, resulting in three distinct prompt datasets categorized as hard, easy, and pass. Then, we employ rejection sampling on the pass prompts to curate a small yet high-quality dataset, enabling a cold-start initialization of the model and facilitating its adaptation to effective reasoning patterns. Subsequently, we employ an entropy-preserving supervised fine-tuning (Entropy-SFT) strategy coupled with token-wise entropy-adaptive (TEA-RL) reinforcement learning guided by rule-based dense rewards. This approach encourages the model to transform its reasoning mechanism, ultimately fostering generalizable reasoning abilities that encompass preview and self-checking. Extensive experiments conducted on instruction-following benchmarks demonstrate remarkable performance improvements across various model scales. Notably, our Light-IF-32B model surpasses both larger open-source models such as DeepSeek-R1 and closed-source models like Doubao-1.6.
title Light-IF: Endowing LLMs with Generalizable Reasoning via Preview and Self-Checking for Complex Instruction Following
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03178