Papers › Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models
Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models
Jeffrey Zhou, Tianjian Lu, Swaroop Mishra, Siddhartha Brahma, Sujoy Basu, Yi Luan, Denny Zhou, Le Hou
One core capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is to follow natural language instructions. However, the evaluation of such abilities is not standardized: Human evaluations are expensive, slow, and not objectively reproducible, while LLM-based auto-evaluation is potentially biased or limited by the ability of the evaluator LLM. To overcome these issues, we introduce Instruction-Following Eval (IFEval) for large language models. IFEval is a straightforward and easy-to-reproduce evaluation benchmark. It focuses on a set of "verifiable instructions" such as "write in more than 400 words" and "mention the keyword of AI at least 3 times". We identified 25 types of those verifiable instructions and constructed around 500 prompts, with each prompt containing one or more verifiable instructions. We show evaluation results of two widely available LLMs on the market. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/instruction_following_eval
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
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Tasks
Datasets
Introduced by this paper, per the archive.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instruction Following | IFEval | GPT-4 | Inst-level loose-accuracy | 85.37 | #3 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Instruction Following | IFEval | GPT-4 | Inst-level strict-accuracy | 83.57 | #3 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Instruction Following | IFEval | GPT-4 | Prompt-level loose-accuracy | 79.3 | #3 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Instruction Following | IFEval | GPT-4 | Prompt-level strict-accuracy | 76.89 | #3 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Instruction Following | IFEval | PaLM 2 S | Inst-level loose-accuracy | 59.11 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Instruction Following | IFEval | PaLM 2 S | Inst-level strict-accuracy | 55.76 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Instruction Following | IFEval | PaLM 2 S | Prompt-level loose-accuracy | 46.95 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Instruction Following | IFEval | PaLM 2 S | Prompt-level strict-accuracy | 43.07 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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