Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in code generation tasks and have become indispensable programming assistants for developers. However, existing code generation benchmarks primarily assess the functional correctness of code generated by LLMs in single-turn interactions, offering limited insight into their capabilities to generate code that strictly follows users' instructions, especially in multi-turn interaction scenarios. In this paper, we introduce \bench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' instruction-following capabilities in interactive code generation. Specifically, \bench incorporates nine types of verifiable instructions aligned with the real-world software development requirements, which can be independently and objectively validated through specified test cases, facilitating the evaluation of instruction-following capability in multi-turn interactions. We evaluate nine prominent LLMs using \bench, and the experimental results reveal a significant disparity between their basic programming capability and instruction-following capability, particularly as task complexity, context length, and the number of dialogue rounds increase.

With the development of large language models, their ability to follow simple instructions has significantly improved. However, adhering to complex instructions remains a major challenge. Current approaches to generating complex instructions are often irrelevant to the current instruction requirements or suffer from limited scalability and diversity. Moreover, methods such as back-translation, while effective for simple instruction generation, fail to leverage the rich contents and structures in large web corpora. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic iterative refinement framework to generate complex instructions with constraints, which not only better reflects the requirements of real scenarios but also significantly enhances LLMs' ability to follow complex instructions. The AIR framework consists of two stages: (1)Generate an initial instruction from a document; (2)Iteratively refine instructions with LLM-as-judge guidance by comparing the model's output with the document to incorporate valuable constraints. Finally, we construct the AIR-10K dataset with 10K complex instructions and demonstrate that instructions generated with our approach significantly improve the model's ability to follow complex instructions, outperforming existing methods for instruction generation.

Prompts are how humans communicate with LLMs. Informative prompts are essential for guiding LLMs to produce the desired output. However, prompt engineering is often tedious and time-consuming, requiring significant expertise, limiting its widespread use. We propose Conversational Prompt Engineering (CPE), a user-friendly tool that helps users create personalized prompts for their specific tasks. CPE uses a chat model to briefly interact with users, helping them articulate their output preferences and integrating these into the prompt. The process includes two main stages: first, the model uses user-provided unlabeled data to generate data-driven questions and utilize user responses to shape the initial instruction. Then, the model shares the outputs generated by the instruction and uses user feedback to further refine the instruction and the outputs. The final result is a few-shot prompt, where the outputs approved by the user serve as few-shot examples. A user study on summarization tasks demonstrates the value of CPE in creating personalized, high-performing prompts. The results suggest that the zero-shot prompt obtained is comparable to its - much longer - few-shot counterpart, indicating significant savings in scenarios involving repetitive tasks with large text volumes.

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) often confronts challenges stemming from the heavy reliance on human annotators in the reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) framework, or the frequent and costly external queries tied to the self-instruct paradigm. In this work, we pivot to Reinforcement Learning (RL) -- but with a twist. Diverging from the typical RLHF, which refines LLMs following instruction data training, we use RL to directly generate the foundational instruction dataset that alone suffices for fine-tuning. Our method, TeaMs-RL, uses a suite of textual operations and rules, prioritizing the diversification of training datasets. It facilitates the generation of high-quality data without excessive reliance on external advanced models, paving the way for a single fine-tuning step and negating the need for subsequent RLHF stages. Our findings highlight key advantages of our approach: reduced need for human involvement and fewer model queries (only $5.73\%$ of WizardLM's total), along with enhanced capabilities of LLMs in crafting and comprehending complex instructions compared to strong baselines, and substantially improved model privacy protection.

In this study, we introduce AmbigNLG, a new task designed to tackle the challenge of task ambiguity in instructions for Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. Despite the impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in understanding and executing a wide range of tasks through natural language interaction, their performance is significantly hindered by the ambiguity present in real-world instructions. To address this, AmbigNLG seeks to identify and mitigate such ambiguities, aiming to refine instructions to match user expectations better. We introduce a dataset, AmbigSNI-NLG, consisting of 2,500 instances, and develop an ambiguity taxonomy for categorizing and annotating instruction ambiguities. Our approach demonstrates substantial improvements in text generation quality, highlighting the critical role of clear and specific instructions in enhancing LLM performance in NLG tasks.

This paper presents VisLingInstruct, a novel approach to advancing Multi-Modal Language Models (MMLMs) in zero-shot learning. Current MMLMs show impressive zero-shot abilities in multi-modal tasks, but their performance depends heavily on the quality of instructions. VisLingInstruct tackles this by autonomously evaluating and optimizing instructional texts through In-Context Learning, improving the synergy between visual perception and linguistic expression in MMLMs. Alongside this instructional advancement, we have also optimized the visual feature extraction modules in MMLMs, further augmenting their responsiveness to textual cues. Our comprehensive experiments on MMLMs, based on FlanT5 and Vicuna, show that VisLingInstruct significantly improves zero-shot performance in visual multi-modal tasks. Notably, it achieves a 13.1% and 9% increase in accuracy over the prior state-of-the-art on the TextVQA and HatefulMemes datasets.

The ability to follow instructions is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle various real-world applications. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating pure response quality, rather than assessing whether the response follows constraints stated in the instruction. To fill this research gap, in this paper, we propose FollowBench, a Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs. FollowBench comprehensively includes five different types (i.e., Content, Situation, Style, Format, and Example) of fine-grained constraints. To enable a precise constraint following estimation on diverse difficulties, we introduce a Multi-level mechanism that incrementally adds a single constraint to the initial instruction at each increased level. To assess whether LLMs' outputs have satisfied every individual constraint, we propose to prompt strong LLMs with constraint-evolution paths to handle challenging open-ended instructions. By evaluating ten closed-source and open-source popular LLMs on FollowBench, we highlight the weaknesses of LLMs in instruction following and point towards potential avenues for future work. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/YJiangcm/FollowBench.