Divide-Verify-Refine: Can LLMs Self-align with Complex Instructions?
Xianren Zhang, Xianfeng Tang, Hui Liu, Zongyu Wu, Qi He, Dongwon Lee, Suhang Wang · 2025
Recent studies show LLMs struggle with complex instructions involving multiple constraints (e.g., length, format, sentiment).Existing works address this issue by fine-tuning, which heavily relies on fine-tuning data quality and is computational expensive.An alternative is leveraging LLMs' self-correction to refine responses for better constraint adherence.However, this is limited by the feedback quality, as LLMs cannot generate reliable feedback or detect errors.Moreover, its effectiveness relies on few-shot examples illustrating response modifications.As constraints in complex instructions are diverse, manually crafting such examples for each constraint type can be laborintensive and sub-optimal.To address these two challenges, we propose the Divide-Verify-Refine (DVR) framework with three steps: (1) Divide complex instructions into single constraints and prepare appropriate tools; (2) Verify responses using tools that provide rigorous check and textual guidance (e.g., Python toolkit for format checks or pre-trained classifiers for content analysis); (3) Refine: To maximize refinement effectiveness, we propose dynamic few-shot prompting, where a refinement repository collects successful refinements, and these examples are selectively retrieved for future refinements.Recognizing the lack of complexity in existing datasets, we create a new dataset of complex instructions.DVR doubles Llama3.1-8B'sconstraint adherence and triples Mistral-7B's performance.The code is available here.