The Curse of Helpfulness D
AI benchmark · Instruction Following
- Publisher
- Paper Arxiv
- Domains
- Instruction Following
- Tier
- D why
- Snapshot
Full listing name: The Curse of Helpfulness: Inverse Scaling Law in Robustness to Distractor Instructions via DistractionIF
What is The Curse of Helpfulness?
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.
Tier D
Long tail: little or no usage data yet.
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- 2 models scored
- fewer than 5 models scored
- in curated RL directories (1 pt)
How we got to tier D
- Adoption: 2 models scored; fewer than 5 models scored. Tier D.
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- Not yet confirmed by a line from its own site or paper.
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