SEQUOR: A Multi-Turn Benchmark for Realistic Constraint Following
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Abstract (arXiv)
In a conversation, a helpful assistant must reliably follow user directives, even as they refine, modify, or contradict earlier requests. Yet most instruction-following benchmarks focus on single-turn or short multi-turn scenarios, leaving open how well models handle long-horizon instruction-following tasks. To bridge this gap, we present SEQUOR, an automatic benchmark for evaluating constraint adherence in long multi-turn conversations. SEQUOR consists of simulated persona-driven interactions built with constraints extracted from real-world conversations. Our results show that even when following a single constraint, instruction-following accuracy consistently decreases as the conversation grows longer, with drops exceeding 11%. This decline becomes larger when models have to follow multiple constraints simultaneously, reducing their accuracy by over 40%. In scenarios where constraints are added or replaced at arbitrary points of the conversation, model accuracy decreases by more than 9%. Taken together, our results reveal that current models still struggle to follow user instructions in multi-turn conversations, and provide a way for better measuring instruction-following capabilities in assistants.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 24 of its 30 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 May 2026.
Builds on
24 of 30 references.
References · 24
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
- 2024A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 1,423
- 2023Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Modelscited by 1,228
- 2024Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preferencecited by 1,184
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- 2024Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agentscited by 830
- 2024LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memorycited by 707
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- 2023LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Datasetcited by 461
- 2025LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversationcited by 429
- 2024Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personascited by 417
- 2023MINT: Evaluating LLMs in Multi-turn Interaction with Tools and Language Feedbackcited by 297
12 more
- 2024MT-Bench-101: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Turn Dialoguescited by 250
- 2025Generalizing Verifiable Instruction Followingcited by 194
- 2025MultiChallenge: A Realistic Multi-Turn Conversation Evaluation Benchmark Challenging to Frontier LLMscited by 180
- 2025Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scalecited by 178
- 2025Qwen2.5-1M Technical Reportcited by 164
- 2024InFoBench: Evaluating Instruction Following Ability in Large Language Modelscited by 135
- 2024Multi-IF: Benchmarking LLMs on Multi-Turn and Multilingual Instructions Followingcited by 102
- 2024MT-Eval: A Multi-Turn Capabilities Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Modelscited by 81
- 2024FOFO: A Benchmark to Evaluate LLMs' Format-Following Capabilitycited by 80
- 2025M-IFEval: Multilingual Instruction-Following Evaluationcited by 17
- 2025From Tools to Teammates: Evaluating LLMs in Multi-Session Coding Interactionscited by 8
- 2025Meeseeks: A Feedback-Driven, Iterative Self-Correction Benchmark evaluating LLMs' Instruction Following Capabilitycited by 3
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
- 2026MAIGO: Mitigating Lost-in-Conversation with History-Cleaned On-Policy Self-Distillationcited by 6
- 2026The Boundaries of Automation: A Theory of Persistent Human Participationcited by 0
- 2026Dead text or binding clause? Measuring and restoring constraint influence in black-box LLM dialoguescited by 0
- 2026Protocol Compression Changes Which Party Pays: Bilateral Cost in Cross-Organization LLM Agent Communicationcited by 0
- 2026The Effects of Incremental Instruction Delivery on Language-Model Creative Writingcited by 0
- 2026You Changed Your Mind, The Model Didn't: Demystifying Intent in Multi-Turn Dialoguecited by 0
- 2026You Changed Your Mind, The Model Didn't: Demystifying Intent in Multi-Turn Dialogue5 Oct 2026
- 2026The Effects of Incremental Instruction Delivery on Language-Model Creative Writing27 Sep 2026
- 2026Protocol Compression Changes Which Party Pays: Bilateral Cost in Cross-Organization LLM Agent Communication5 Sep 2026
- 2026Dead text or binding clause? Measuring and restoring constraint influence in black-box LLM dialogues12 Aug 2026
- 2026The Boundaries of Automation: A Theory of Persistent Human Participation23 Jul 2026
- 2026MAIGO: Mitigating Lost-in-Conversation with History-Cleaned On-Policy Self-Distillation26 May 2026