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Auteurs principaux: Elder, Ben, Duesterwald, Evelyn, Muthusamy, Vinod
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14842
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author Elder, Ben
Duesterwald, Evelyn
Muthusamy, Vinod
author_facet Elder, Ben
Duesterwald, Evelyn
Muthusamy, Vinod
contents A typical approach developers follow to influence an LLM's behavior in an application is through careful manipulation of the prompt, such as by adding or modifying instructions. However, merely adding more instructions provides little assurance that they will actually be followed. We introduce Instruction Boosting as a post-generation method to increase the reliability of LLM prompt instructions. We show that Instruction Boosting improves the instruction following rate by up to 7 points for two instructions and up to 4 points for ten instructions. To demonstrate these results we introduce SCALEDIF, a benchmark with a scaled instruction volume of up to ten instructions per data sample. We also present an analysis of the commonly observed trend that performance degrades as more instructions are added. We show that an important factor contributing to this trend is the degree of tension and conflict that arises as the number of instructions is increased. We contribute a quantitative conflict scoring tool that explains the observed performance trends and provides feedback to developers on the impact that additional prompt instructions have on a model's performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_14842
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Boosting Instruction Following at Scale
Elder, Ben
Duesterwald, Evelyn
Muthusamy, Vinod
Artificial Intelligence
A typical approach developers follow to influence an LLM's behavior in an application is through careful manipulation of the prompt, such as by adding or modifying instructions. However, merely adding more instructions provides little assurance that they will actually be followed. We introduce Instruction Boosting as a post-generation method to increase the reliability of LLM prompt instructions. We show that Instruction Boosting improves the instruction following rate by up to 7 points for two instructions and up to 4 points for ten instructions. To demonstrate these results we introduce SCALEDIF, a benchmark with a scaled instruction volume of up to ten instructions per data sample. We also present an analysis of the commonly observed trend that performance degrades as more instructions are added. We show that an important factor contributing to this trend is the degree of tension and conflict that arises as the number of instructions is increased. We contribute a quantitative conflict scoring tool that explains the observed performance trends and provides feedback to developers on the impact that additional prompt instructions have on a model's performance.
title Boosting Instruction Following at Scale
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14842