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    "story_id": "mp-2026-10-24-010",
    "source_story_id": "tmp-story-dial-instruction-adherence",
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    "section": "frontier-models",
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    "headline": "Instruction Following Gets a Dimmer Switch",
    "slug": "instruction-following-gets-a-dimmer-switch",
    "dek": "DIAL adds a lightweight text-conditioned adapter whose numerical control changes how strongly a model follows requested concepts and personas.",
    "summary": "DIAL adds a lightweight text-conditioned adapter whose numerical control changes how strongly a model follows requested concepts and personas.",
    "body_text": "Prompts do not reliably express how strongly a model should follow a broad instruction such as being concise or adopting a persona. DIAL distills multiple instruction-adherence levels from classifier-free guidance into a lightweight steering adapter. A text-conditioned classifier sets token-level edit magnitude while accounting for hidden-state geometry. Across the evaluated model families, concept scores rose monotonically with target adherence; training on the 98,625-instruction SteerIF collection also improved several verifiable instruction-following tasks when combined with prompting. The method controls the tested instruction concepts and does not guarantee faithful behavior under every request.",
    "why_it_matters": "DIAL adds a lightweight text-conditioned adapter whose numerical control changes how strongly a model follows requested concepts and personas.",
    "limitations": [
      "Prompts do not reliably express how strongly a model should follow a broad instruction such as being concise or adopting a persona.",
      "The method controls the tested instruction concepts and does not guarantee faithful behavior under every request."
    ],
    "importance": 8,
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    "first_published_at": "2026-10-24T09:00:00.000-04:00",
    "modified_at": "2026-10-24T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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        "qualification": "Prompts do not reliably express how strongly a model should follow a broad instruction such as being concise or adopting a persona."
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    "tags": [
      "instruction following",
      "steering",
      "adapters"
    ],
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  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-10-24-010",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2610.31438, original v1",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31438v1",
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      "published_at": "2026-10-22T11:34:39.000-04:00",
      "accessed_at": "2026-10-24T08:23:48.747-04:00",
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    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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    "title": "Instruction Following Gets a Dimmer Switch",
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