Instruction Stacking Collapse: A Benchmark and the Capability-Dependent Value of Prompt Compilation
Production prompts rarely carry a single instruction. One system message may require valid JSON, a word limit, three citations, and a fixed tone at the same time. We study how instruction-following degrades as such constraints accumulate. We introduce a benchmark that stacks 24 verifier-checked instructions, one to twenty at a time, and evaluate three production-tier LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5-mini, Gemini 2.5 Flash). Instruction-following degrades non-linearly: the follow rate falls from ~96% to as low as 20%, driven by a structured and reproducible set of pairwise conflicts. A single "output JSON" constraint, for example, is jointly unsatisfiable with nine others. We then evaluate a...
| Authors | Atul Anand, Sourav Chattaraj |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 31 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 July 2026 |
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