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IH-Challenge: A Training Dataset to Improve Instruction Hierarchy on Frontier LLMs

Chuan Guo, Juan Felipe Ceron Uribe, Sicheng Zhu, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Steph Lin, Nikhil Kandpal, Milad Nasr, Rai, Sam Toyer, Miles Wang, Yaodong Yu, Alex Beutel, Kai Xiao · Mar 11, 2026 · Citations: 0

Automatic Metrics General Red Team
Open arXiv Find Implementation RSS feed Shortlist (0)

How to use this page

Moderate trust

Use this for comparison and orientation, not as your only source.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Moderate

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Instruction hierarchy (IH) defines how LLMs prioritize system, developer, user, and tool instructions under conflict, providing a concrete, trust-ordered policy for resolving instruction conflicts. IH is key to defending against jailbreaks, system prompt extractions, and agentic prompt injections. However, robust IH behavior is difficult to train: IH failures can be confounded with instruction-following failures, conflicts can be nuanced, and models can learn shortcuts such as overrefusing. We introduce IH-Challenge, a reinforcement learning training dataset, to address these difficulties. Fine-tuning GPT-5-Mini on IH-Challenge with online adversarial example generation improves IH robustness by +10.0% on average across 16 in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and human red-teaming benchmarks (84.1% to 94.1%), reduces unsafe behavior from 6.6% to 0.7% while improving helpfulness on general safety evaluations, and saturates an internal static agentic prompt injection evaluation, with minimal capability regression. We release the IH-Challenge dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/openai/ih-challenge) to support future research on robust instruction hierarchy.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper has useful evaluation signal, but protocol completeness is partial; pair it with related papers before deciding implementation strategy.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Trust level

Moderate

Usefulness score

65/100 • Medium

Useful as a secondary reference; validate protocol details against neighboring papers.

Human Feedback Signal

Detected

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Moderate-confidence candidate

Extraction confidence 70%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

strong

Red Team

Directly usable for protocol triage.

"Instruction hierarchy (IH) defines how LLMs prioritize system, developer, user, and tool instructions under conflict, providing a concrete, trust-ordered policy for resolving instruction conflicts."

Evaluation Modes

strong

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Instruction hierarchy (IH) defines how LLMs prioritize system, developer, user, and tool instructions under conflict, providing a concrete, trust-ordered policy for resolving instruction conflicts."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Instruction hierarchy (IH) defines how LLMs prioritize system, developer, user, and tool instructions under conflict, providing a concrete, trust-ordered policy for resolving instruction conflicts."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Instruction hierarchy (IH) defines how LLMs prioritize system, developer, user, and tool instructions under conflict, providing a concrete, trust-ordered policy for resolving instruction conflicts."

Reported Metrics

strong

Helpfulness

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Fine-tuning GPT-5-Mini on IH-Challenge with online adversarial example generation improves IH robustness by +10.0% on average across 16 in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and human red-teaming benchmarks (84.1% to 94.1%), reduces unsafe behavior from 6.6% to 0.7% while improving helpfulness on general safety evaluations, and saturates an internal static agentic prompt injection evaluation, with minimal capability regression."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: Yes
  • Feedback types: Red Team
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: General

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Moderate
  • Use this page as: Secondary protocol comparison source

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

helpfulness

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Instruction hierarchy (IH) defines how LLMs prioritize system, developer, user, and tool instructions under conflict, providing a concrete, trust-ordered policy for resolving instruction conflicts.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Instruction hierarchy (IH) defines how LLMs prioritize system, developer, user, and tool instructions under conflict, providing a concrete, trust-ordered policy for resolving instruction conflicts.
  • IH is key to defending against jailbreaks, system prompt extractions, and agentic prompt injections.
  • However, robust IH behavior is difficult to train: IH failures can be confounded with instruction-following failures, conflicts can be nuanced, and models can learn shortcuts such as overrefusing.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • IH is key to defending against jailbreaks, system prompt extractions, and agentic prompt injections.
  • We introduce IH-Challenge, a reinforcement learning training dataset, to address these difficulties.
  • Fine-tuning GPT-5-Mini on IH-Challenge with online adversarial example generation improves IH robustness by +10.0% on average across 16 in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and human red-teaming benchmarks (84.1% to 94.1%), reduces unsafe…

Why It Matters For Eval

  • IH is key to defending against jailbreaks, system prompt extractions, and agentic prompt injections.
  • Fine-tuning GPT-5-Mini on IH-Challenge with online adversarial example generation improves IH robustness by +10.0% on average across 16 in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and human red-teaming benchmarks (84.1% to 94.1%), reduces unsafe…

Researcher Checklist

  • Pass: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    Detected: Red Team

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: helpfulness

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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