Michael Pokorny
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.
Abstract:Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90\% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. HLE consists of 3,000 questions across dozens of subjects, including mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. HLE is developed globally by subject-matter experts and consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions suitable for automated grading. Each question has a known solution that is unambiguous and easily verifiable, but cannot be quickly answered via internet retrieval. State-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate low accuracy and calibration on HLE, highlighting a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the expert human frontier on closed-ended academic questions. To inform research and policymaking upon a clear understanding of model capabilities, we publicly release HLE at https://lastexam.ai.