# LsrIF: Enhancing Logic-Structured Instruction Following of Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06431 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06431/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [Length-Controlled AlpacaEval: A Simple Way to Debias Automatic Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04475/) (2024)
- [Generalizing Verifiable Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02833/) (2025)
- [MultiChallenge: A Realistic Multi-Turn Conversation Evaluation Benchmark Challenging to Frontier LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17399/) (2025)
- [Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07001/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Complex Instruction-Following with Multiple Constraints Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03978/) (2024)
- [COLLIE: Systematic Construction of Constrained Text Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08689/) (2023)
- [CFBench: A Comprehensive Constraints-Following Benchmark for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01122/) (2024)
- [Enigmata: Scaling Logical Reasoning in Large Language Models with Synthetic Verifiable Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19914/) (2025)
- [When Thinking Fails: The Pitfalls of Reasoning for Instruction-Following in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11423/) (2025)
- [AGENTIF: Benchmarking Instruction Following of Large Language Models in Agentic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16944/) (2025)
- [DeSTA2: Developing Instruction-Following Speech Language Model Without Speech Instruction-Tuning Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20007/) (2024)
- [VerIF: Verification Engineering for Reinforcement Learning in Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09942/) (2025)
- [ComplexBench-Edit: Benchmarking Complex Instruction-Driven Image Editing via Compositional Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12830/) (2025)
- [UltraIF: Advancing Instruction Following from the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04153/) (2025)
- [MuSC: Improving Complex Instruction Following with Multi-granularity Self-Contrastive Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11541/) (2025)
- [Light-IF: Endowing LLMs with Generalizable Reasoning via Preview and Self-Checking for Complex Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03178/) (2025)
- [Instructions are all you need: Self-supervised Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14420/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Instruction following is critical for large language models, yet real-world instructions often involve multiple constraints with logical structures, such as parallel composition, sequential dependencies, and conditional branching. Existing methods typically construct data by simply combining constraints and aggregate rewards by averaging individual constraint scores during training, overlooking logical dependencies and introducing noisy signals. We propose LsrIF, a training framework for logic-structured instruction following. LsrIF constructs data by organizing atomic constraints into parallel, sequential, conditional, and nested structures, and applies structure-aware reward aggregation aligned with their execution semantics: averaging rewards for parallel constraints, decaying later rewards after early failures in sequential structures, and rewarding only active branches in conditional structures. Experiments show that LsrIF improves instruction following in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings while also benefiting logic reasoning. Further analysis indicates that logic-structured training increases attention to constraint-related tokens and logical connectors, suggesting improved modeling of instruction logic. We will release our data and code for future research.
