SEIF: Self-Evolving Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ren, Qingyu, He, Qianyu, Zhu, Jiajie, Chen, Xingzhou, Chang, Jingwen, Sun, Zeye, Xia, Han, Yu, Fei, Liang, Jiaqing, Xiao, Yanghua
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Ren, Qingyu
He, Qianyu
Zhu, Jiajie
Chen, Xingzhou
Chang, Jingwen
Sun, Zeye
Xia, Han
Yu, Fei
Liang, Jiaqing
Xiao, Yanghua
author_facet Ren, Qingyu
He, Qianyu
Zhu, Jiajie
Chen, Xingzhou
Chang, Jingwen
Sun, Zeye
Xia, Han
Yu, Fei
Liang, Jiaqing
Xiao, Yanghua
contents Instruction following is a fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs), yet continuously improving this capability remains challenging. Existing methods typically rely either on costly external supervision from humans or strong teacher models, or on self-play training with static-difficulty instructions that cannot evolve as the model's capabilities improve. To address these limitations, we propose SEIF (Self-Evolving Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following), a self-evolving framework for enhancing the instruction-following ability of LLMs. SEIF forms a closed self-evolution loop that improves the model's instruction-following ability, where instruction difficulty evolution and model capability evolution reinforce each other. SEIF consists of four roles: an Instructor that generates increasingly challenging instructions, a Filter that removes conflicting or invalid instructions to ensure data quality, a Follower that learns to follow evolved instructions, and a Judger that provides reward signals for reinforcement learning. The Instructor and Follower are alternately trained and co-evolve throughout the process. Experiments across multiple model scales and architectures show that SEIF consistently improves instruction-following performance, suggesting strong generality. Further analyses reveal the sources of improvement and identify an effective training strategy for self-evolution on open-ended tasks: sufficient early-stage training to build a solid foundation, followed by moderate late-stage training to mitigate overfitting and achieve better final performance. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Rainier-rq1/SEIF.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07465
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SEIF: Self-Evolving Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following
Ren, Qingyu
He, Qianyu
Zhu, Jiajie
Chen, Xingzhou
Chang, Jingwen
Sun, Zeye
Xia, Han
Yu, Fei
Liang, Jiaqing
Xiao, Yanghua
Computation and Language
Instruction following is a fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs), yet continuously improving this capability remains challenging. Existing methods typically rely either on costly external supervision from humans or strong teacher models, or on self-play training with static-difficulty instructions that cannot evolve as the model's capabilities improve. To address these limitations, we propose SEIF (Self-Evolving Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following), a self-evolving framework for enhancing the instruction-following ability of LLMs. SEIF forms a closed self-evolution loop that improves the model's instruction-following ability, where instruction difficulty evolution and model capability evolution reinforce each other. SEIF consists of four roles: an Instructor that generates increasingly challenging instructions, a Filter that removes conflicting or invalid instructions to ensure data quality, a Follower that learns to follow evolved instructions, and a Judger that provides reward signals for reinforcement learning. The Instructor and Follower are alternately trained and co-evolve throughout the process. Experiments across multiple model scales and architectures show that SEIF consistently improves instruction-following performance, suggesting strong generality. Further analyses reveal the sources of improvement and identify an effective training strategy for self-evolution on open-ended tasks: sufficient early-stage training to build a solid foundation, followed by moderate late-stage training to mitigate overfitting and achieve better final performance. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Rainier-rq1/SEIF.
title SEIF: Self-Evolving Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07465