Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many tasks, yet they struggle with reliably following multiple instructions, either by failing to satisfy individual constraints or by struggling to balance competing constraints simultaneously. We formalize this challenge as the Constraint Adherence Problem (CAP).
RECAST is a new framework that generates datasets with far more constraints per example than existing benchmarks, aiming to push large language models (LLMs) to better follow complex instructions. The authors built RECAST-30K, a 30,000‑instance dataset covering 19 constraint types extracted from real prompt‑response pairs, and showed that fine‑tuning on it improves LLMs’ ability to handle complex tasks without harming general performance. RECAST also provides rule‑based and LLM‑based validators for automatic constraint verification, enabling reward‑based reinforcement learning to further enhance model performance on challenging tasks.
By Zhengkang Guo, Wenhao Liu, Mingchen Xie, Jingwen Xu, Zisu Huang, Muzhao Tian, Jianhan Xu, Yuanzhe Shen, Qi Qian, Muling Wu, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, He-Da Wang, Hu Yao, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv:2607. 04854v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite their strong reasoning capabilities and extensive world knowledge, Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently generate plans that violate task constraints, undermining their reliability in real-world applications.
By Qiuyi Qi, Jinjian Zhang, Mutian Bao, Tian Liang, Guocong Li, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Jie Liu, Ming Kong, Linjian Mo, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
Despite their strong reasoning capabilities and extensive world knowledge, Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently generate plans that violate task constraints, undermining their reliability in real-world applications. This deficiency arises from a lack of systematic mechanisms to incorporate constraint information during the generation process.
arXiv:2604.27251v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire reasoning capabilities through shared inference patterns in pre-training data, which are further elicite...
By Xingwei Tan, Marco Valentino, Mahmud Elahi Akhter, Yuxiang Zhou, Maria Liakata, Nikolaos Aletras
arXiv:2511. 04694v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As large language model (LLM) based systems take on high-stakes roles in real-world decision-making, they must reconcile competing instructions from multiple sources within a single prompt context.
By Zishuo Zheng, Vidhisha Balachandran, Chan Young Park, Faeze Brahman, Sachin Kumar
arXiv:2606. 07108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate remarkable performance improvements by iteratively reflecting, exploring, and executing complex tasks, yet suffer from inefficiencies due to redundant reasoning, known as "overthinking".
By Tengyao Tu, Yulin Li, Hui-Ling Zhen, Libo Qin, Zhoujun Wei, Jinghua Piao, Zhuotao Tian, Yong Li, Min Zhang
arXiv:2503. 06573v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent LLMs have shown remarkable success in following user instructions, yet handling instructions with multiple constraints remains a significant challenge.
By Gili Lior, Asaf Yehudai, Ariel Gera, Liat Ein-Dor
CCTU is a new benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on their ability to use tools under complex constraints. It includes 200 test cases that average seven constraint types and 4,700‑token prompts, covering resource, behavior, toolset, and response dimensions. An executable validation module performs step‑level checks, and nine state‑of‑the‑art LLMs were tested, revealing that none exceed a 20% task completion rate when strict constraints are enforced, with frequent violations and limited self‑refinement.
By Junjie Ye, Guoqiang Zhang, Wenjie Fu, Zelin Li, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
Instruction-following ability is critical for deploying large language models in real-world applications, where downstream components depend on the output satisfying specific constraints. Modern deployments increasingly handle the full task in a single LLM call, with one prompt specifying a layered output whose overall artifact, structural sections, and nested fields must each satisfy concrete constraints.
arXiv:2606. 03705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are widely used to mitigate the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as outdated knowledge and hallucinations.
By Weiwei Ding, Zixuan Li, Long Bai, Zhuo Chen, Kun Su, Fei Wang, Xiaolong Jin, Jin Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations among multiple entities across extended contexts while maintaining consistency across predicted triples. Although large language models (LLMs) show remarkable reasoning capabilities in information extraction, their predictions are typically generated independently for each candidate triple and may violate fundamental relational constraints such as transitivity, symmetry, and functional uniqueness, leading to contradictory and unreliable outputs.