Where Instruction Hierarchy Breaks: Diagnosing and Repairing Failures in Reasoning Language Models
Reasoning language models deployed in agentic workflows must follow an instruction hierarchy: when instructions from different sources conflict, the model should obey the highest-privilege applicable instruction. Existing benchmarks largely measure this behavior end-to-end, asking whether the final response is compliant. However, a non-compliant response can arise from several distinct failures: the model may fail to identify the relevant instructions in context, fail to resolve conflicts among identified instructions, or correctly resolve the conflict in its reasoning while still producing a violating response. We introduce a white-box diagnostic framework that localizes instruction hier...
| Authors | Sanjay Kariyappa, G. Edward Suh |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 5 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 June 2026 |
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