frontier models
Instruction Following Gets a Dimmer Switch
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.
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.
Limits and context
- 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.
Key claims
DIAL adds a lightweight text-conditioned adapter whose numerical control changes how strongly a model follows requested concepts and personas.
Qualification: Prompts do not reliably express how strongly a model should follow a broad instruction such as being concise or adopting a persona.
Evidence: source-2026-10-24-010
Sources
- arXiv preprint 2610.31438, original v1arXiv · primary research
Corrections
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