大型语言模型智能体中的多层指令体系

摘要

大型语言模型智能体从多个来源接收指令——系统消息、用户提示、工具输出等——每个来源具有不同的可信度与权威层级。当这些指令发生冲突时，模型必须可靠地遵循最高权限指令以保持安全性和有效性。主流范式"指令层级"采用固定且有限的权限等级（通常少于五级），通过刚性角色标签（如系统>用户）进行定义。这种范式难以适应现实世界的智能体场景，因为冲突可能来自更多来源和情境。本研究提出"多层级指令体系"，该范式能解决具有任意多权限层级的指令冲突。我们创建了首个面向该范式的基准测试集ManyIH-Bench，要求模型处理多达12个具有不同权限层级的冲突指令，包含853项智能体任务（427项代码生成与426项指令遵循）。该基准通过LLM生成并经人工验证的约束条件，构建了涵盖46种现实智能体的真实且复杂的测试场景。实验表明，当前最先进的模型在指令冲突升级时表现不佳（准确率约40%）。这项工作揭示了在智能体场景中亟需开发能实现细粒度、可扩展指令冲突解决方法的紧迫性。

English

Large language model agents receive instructions from many sources-system messages, user prompts, tool outputs, and more-each carrying different levels of trust and authority. When these instructions conflict, models must reliably follow the highest-privilege instruction to remain safe and effective. The dominant paradigm, instruction hierarchy (IH), assumes a fixed, small set of privilege levels (typically fewer than five) defined by rigid role labels (e.g., system > user). This is inadequate for real-world agentic settings, where conflicts can arise across far more sources and contexts. In this work, we propose Many-Tier Instruction Hierarchy (ManyIH), a paradigm for resolving instruction conflicts among instructions with arbitrarily many privilege levels. We introduce ManyIH-Bench, the first benchmark for ManyIH. ManyIH-Bench requires models to navigate up to 12 levels of conflicting instructions with varying privileges, comprising 853 agentic tasks (427 coding and 426 instruction-following). ManyIH-Bench composes constraints developed by LLMs and verified by humans to create realistic and difficult test cases spanning 46 real-world agents. Our experiments show that even the current frontier models perform poorly (~40% accuracy) when instruction conflict scales. This work underscores the urgent need for methods that explicitly target fine-grained, scalable instruction conflict resolution in agentic settings.

大型语言模型智能体中的多层指令体系

Many-Tier Instruction Hierarchy in LLM Agents

摘要

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