IF-CRITIC: Towards a Fine-Grained LLM Critic for Instruction-Following Evaluation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wen, Bosi, Niu, Yilin, Wang, Cunxiang, Ke, Pei, Ling, Xiaoying, Zhang, Ying, Zeng, Aohan, Wang, Hongning, Huang, Minlie
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Wen, Bosi
Niu, Yilin
Wang, Cunxiang
Ke, Pei
Ling, Xiaoying
Zhang, Ying
Zeng, Aohan
Wang, Hongning
Huang, Minlie
author_facet Wen, Bosi
Niu, Yilin
Wang, Cunxiang
Ke, Pei
Ling, Xiaoying
Zhang, Ying
Zeng, Aohan
Wang, Hongning
Huang, Minlie
contents Instruction-following is a fundamental ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring their generated outputs to follow multiple constraints imposed in input instructions. Numerous studies have attempted to enhance this ability through preference optimization or reinforcement learning based on reward signals from LLM-as-a-Judge. However, existing evaluation models for instruction-following still possess many deficiencies, such as substantial costs and unreliable assessments. To this end, we propose IF-CRITIC, an LLM critic for fine-grained, efficient, and reliable instruction-following evaluation. We first develop a checklist generator to decompose instructions and generate constraint checklists. With the assistance of the checklists, we collect high-quality critique training data through a multi-stage critique filtering mechanism and employ a constraint-level preference optimization method to train IF-CRITIC. Extensive experiments show that the evaluation performance of IF-CRITIC can beat strong LLM-as-a-Judge baselines, including o4-mini and Gemini-3-Pro. With the reward signals provided by IF-CRITIC, LLMs can achieve substantial performance gains in instruction-following optimization under lower computational overhead compared to strong LLM critic baselines. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/thu-coai/IF-CRITIC.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01014
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IF-CRITIC: Towards a Fine-Grained LLM Critic for Instruction-Following Evaluation
Wen, Bosi
Niu, Yilin
Wang, Cunxiang
Ke, Pei
Ling, Xiaoying
Zhang, Ying
Zeng, Aohan
Wang, Hongning
Huang, Minlie
Computation and Language
Instruction-following is a fundamental ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring their generated outputs to follow multiple constraints imposed in input instructions. Numerous studies have attempted to enhance this ability through preference optimization or reinforcement learning based on reward signals from LLM-as-a-Judge. However, existing evaluation models for instruction-following still possess many deficiencies, such as substantial costs and unreliable assessments. To this end, we propose IF-CRITIC, an LLM critic for fine-grained, efficient, and reliable instruction-following evaluation. We first develop a checklist generator to decompose instructions and generate constraint checklists. With the assistance of the checklists, we collect high-quality critique training data through a multi-stage critique filtering mechanism and employ a constraint-level preference optimization method to train IF-CRITIC. Extensive experiments show that the evaluation performance of IF-CRITIC can beat strong LLM-as-a-Judge baselines, including o4-mini and Gemini-3-Pro. With the reward signals provided by IF-CRITIC, LLMs can achieve substantial performance gains in instruction-following optimization under lower computational overhead compared to strong LLM critic baselines. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/thu-coai/IF-CRITIC.
title IF-CRITIC: Towards a Fine-Grained LLM Critic for Instruction-Following Evaluation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01014