2024/04/03 by Haoran Sun, Lixin Liu, Sun, Haoran +11 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2404.02823
openalex publication_date 2024/04/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial to real-world applications. Despite recent advances, several studies have highlighted that LLMs struggle when faced with challenging instructions, especially those that include complex constraints, hindering their effectiveness in various tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce Conifer, a novel instruction tuning dataset, designed to enhance LLMs to follow multi-level instructions with complex constraints. Utilizing GPT-4, we curate the dataset by a series of LLM-driven refinement processes to ensure high quality. We also propose a progressive learning scheme that emphasizes an easy-to-hard progression, and learning from process feedback. Models trained with Conifer exhibit remarkable improvements in instruction-following abilities, especially for instructions with complex constraints. On several instruction-following benchmarks, our 7B model outperforms the state-of-the-art open-source 7B models, even exceeds the performance of models 10 times larger on certain metrics. All the code and Conifer dataset are available at https://www.github.com/ConiferLM/Conifer.