FollowBench: A Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models

Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Xingshan Zeng, Wanjun Zhong, Liangyou Li, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Wei Wang


Abstract
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 13 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.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.257
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4667–4688
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.257
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.257
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Xingshan Zeng, Wanjun Zhong, Liangyou Li, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, and Wei Wang. 2024. FollowBench: A Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4667–4688, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FollowBench: A Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models (Jiang et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.257.pdf