arXiv Computation and Language By Nicole Geumheon Liu, Haeun Jang, Yonghyun Jun, Hwanhee Lee

IHDec: Divergence-Steered Contrastive Decoding for Securing Multi-Turn Instruction Hierarchies

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Large Language Models often fail to respect instruction hierarchies in multi-turn settings, sometimes following lower-priority directives over higher ones. The authors formalize this failure using a Jensen‑Shannon Divergence framework and introduce IHDec, a contrastive decoding method that detects hierarchy violations at the token level and suppresses subordinate role influence without any fine‑tuning. Experiments show IHDec outperforms training‑based baselines, maintains overall response quality, improves safety against adversarial prompts, and scales well with larger models.

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