The paper investigates how large language models balance instruction-following with pattern completion when the two objectives conflict. By creating dialogues where a user instruction to act in a target way T is opposed by assistant turns that demonstrate a competing pattern P, the authors measure instruction-following rates across 13 models and 16 instructions over up to 50 turns. Results show wide variability (1%–99%) in instruction adherence, with robustness influenced by instruction content, output format, and chain-of-thought reasoning, but overall instruction-following remains brittle under induction pressure.
By Carolina Camassa, Derek Shiller
arXiv:2606. 15420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A constitution tells a language model what to value, but little tells us whether it does.
By Tong Che, Rui Wu
arXiv:2606. 07808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning language models deployed in agentic workflows must follow an instruction hierarchy: when instructions from different sources conflict, the model should obey the highest-privilege applicable instruction.
By Sanjay Kariyappa, G. Edward Suh
arXiv:2608. 13921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly maintain personal memory across sessions, but it can conflict.
By Lu Yang, Shusheng Xu, Zhuoran Li, Tongkai Yang, Longbo Huang
arXiv:2607. 24765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can give different answers to the same decision problem across runs, and reverse a decision when their own prior answer returns as context.
By Gi-Hun Lee, Joong Yull Park
LLM agents increasingly maintain personal memory across sessions, but it can conflict. Preferences depend on context, behavior evolves, and sources can conflict. When a query lacks context, time, or s...
arXiv:2608. 11797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging by task arithmetic works until it doesn't, and the field diagnoses why with magnitudes: layerwise representation bias, deviations from cross-task linearity, parameter overlap.
By Chencheng Zhu
arXiv:2608. 12599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn dialogues let users revoke constraints as easily as impose them, but revocation does not reliably take effect: models keep enacting withdrawn requirements (occasionally beneath comments asserting their removal), a failure we call \emph{behavioral relapse}, or revocation inertia.
By Haoyuan Zhu
arXiv:2606. 31371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When large language model (LLM) agents adapt their behavior through evaluator feedback, systematic evaluator biases propagate into the agent's learned strategy distribution - a phenomenon termed evaluator preference coupling.
By Zewen Liu
arXiv:2606. 00914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly act after consuming ranked external information streams such as social feeds, search results, retrieval contexts, and email queues, yet safety evaluations almost always test the model or the user prompt in isolation, never the upstream ranker that decides what the agent reads just before it acts.
By Rana Muhammad Usman
arXiv:2607. 02255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory for a long-horizon LLM agent is a contract about what each future decision is allowed to see.
By Xiangchen Cheng, Yunwei Jiang, Jianwen Sun, Zizhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Xiangcheng Cao, Yihao Liu, Fanrui Zhang, Li Jin, Kaipeng Zhang
arXiv:2608. 08239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM routers promise efficiency by matching each request to the cheapest adequate model, and are increasingly applied per step inside multi-step agents.
By Ashritha Gonuguntla