AdvancedIF: Rubric-Based Benchmarking and Reinforcement Learning for Advancing LLM Instruction Following

Kavli Affiliate: Li Xin Li
| First 5 Authors: [#item_custom_name[1, [#item_custom_name[2, [#item_custom_name[3, [#item_custom_name[4, [#item_custom_name[5| Summary:Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to impressive performance on a range of tasks, yet advanced instruction following (IF)-especially for complex, multi-turn, and system-prompted instructions-remains a significant challenge. Rigorous evaluation and effective training for such capabilities are hindered by the lack of high-quality, human-annotated benchmarks and reliable, interpretable reward signals. In this work, we introduce AdvancedIF (we will release this benchmark soon), a comprehensive benchmark featuring over 1,600 prompts and expert-curated rubrics that assess LLMs ability to follow complex, multi-turn, and system-level instructions. We further propose RIFL (Rubric-based Instruction-Following Learning), a novel post-training pipeline that leverages rubric generation, a finetuned rubric verifier, and reward shaping to enable effective reinforcement learning for instruction following. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIFL substantially improves the instruction-following abilities of LLMs, achieving a 6.7% absolute gain on AdvancedIF and strong results on public benchmarks. Our ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component in RIFL. This work establishes rubrics as a powerful tool for both training and evaluating advanced IF in LLMs, paving the way for more capable and reliable AI systems.| Search Query: arXiv Query: search_query=au:Li OR all:Li-Xin&id_list=&start=0&max_results=3Read More