大模型越大会越容易被无关指令干扰,导致错误执行。
The Curse of Helpfulness: Inverse Scaling Law in Robustness to Distractor Instructions via DistractionIF

- 构建新基准DistractionIF,测试模型对参考文本中干扰指令的鲁棒性。
- 发现模型规模越大,准确率下降最多达30点,呈现反向缩放现象。
- 用强化学习可恢复模型对指令与数据的区分能力,提升鲁棒性15.5%。
大型语言模型(LLMs)越来越多地应用于代理和检索增强生成(RAG)系统中,需根据用户指定任务在外部提供的参考文本上执行操作。实际中,此类上下文常为非结构化且混有类似指令的语义噪声(如编辑注释、系统痕迹),应严格视为数据而非指令。我们提出DistractionIF基准,用于评估模型在参考文本中面对干扰指令时的鲁棒性。在多种模型中,我们观察到一致的反向缩放现象:模型越大,鲁棒性越差,性能最高下降30点。机制分析显示,规模扩大削弱了鲁棒行为与被干扰行为之间的概率边界,使模型更易将噪声误认为指令。为应对该问题,我们证明使用强化学习(特别是组相对策略优化,GRPO)可重建此边界,提升鲁棒性最高达15.5%,且不损害通用指令遵循能力。研究揭示了参考文本任务中的关键指令遵循鲁棒性差距,并确立强化学习是大规模实现数据-指令严格分离的可行路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in agentic and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, where they must execute user-specified tasks over externally provided reference text. In practice, such context is often unstructured and contaminated with benign but instruction-like semantic noise, such as editorial comments and system traces, which should be treated strictly as data. We introduce DistractionIF, a benchmark designed to evaluate robustness against such distractor instructions in reference text. Across a broad range of models, we observe a consistent inverse scaling phenomenon: larger models are often less robust, with performance dropping by up to 30 points as scale increases. Mechanistically, our perplexity analysis reveals that scaling erodes the probabilistic boundary between robust and distracted behaviors, making models increasingly prone to over-interpreting noise as instructions. To address this, we demonstrate that reinforcement learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), can restore this boundary, improving robustness by up to 15.5% without compromising general instruction-following capability. Our findings highlight a critical instruction-following robustness gap in reference-grounded tasks and establish reinforcement learning as a promising path for enforcing strict data-instruction separation at scale.
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