Divide-Verify-Refine: Can LLMs Self-Align with Complex Instructions?

Recent studies show LLMs struggle with complex instructions involving multiple constraints (e.g., length, format, sentiment). Existing works address this issue by fine-tuning, which heavily relies on fine-tuning data quality and is computational expensive. An alternative is leveraging LLMs' self-correction to refine responses for better constraint adherence. However, this is limited by the feedback quality, as LLMs cannot generate reliable feedback or detect errors. Moreover, its effectiveness relies on few-shot examples illustrating response modifications. As constraints in complex instructions are diverse, manually crafting such examples for each constraint type can be labor-intensive and sub-optimal. To address these two challenges, we propose the Divide-Verify-Refine (DVR) framework with three steps: (1) Divide complex instructions into single constraints and prepare appropriate tools; (2) Verify responses using tools that provide rigorous check and textual guidance (e.g., Python toolkit for format checks or pre-trained classifiers for content analysis); (3) Refine: To maximize refinement effectiveness, we propose dynamic few-shot prompting, where a refinement repository collects successful refinements, and these examples are selectively retrieved for future refinements. Recognizing the lack of complexity in existing datasets, we create a new dataset of complex instructions. DVR doubles Llama3.1-8B's constraint adherence and triples Mistral-7B's performance.