CIFE: Code Instruction-Following Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to real-world code generation, where functional correctness alone is insufficient for reliable deployment, developers also expect adherence to explicit requirements for robustness, formatting, and security. Existing benchmarks primarily assess correctness through test-case execution, offering limited insight into how reliably models follow such constraints. We introduce a benchmark of 1,000 Python tasks, each paired with an average of 7 developer-specified constraints spanning 13 categories. Constraints are curated through a four-stage human-LLM pipeline to ensure they are atomic, relevant, and objective. We evaluate 14 open- and closed-source models using complementary adherence metrics and propose the C2A Score, a composite measure that jointly captures correctness and constraint compliance. Results reveal a substantial gap between partial and strict satisfaction, while strong models achieve over 90% partial adherence, strict adherence remains between 39-66%. These findings highlight that trustworthy code generation requires not only correctness but also consistent adherence to developer intent.

Understand the Implication: Learning to Think for Pragmatic Understanding

Pragmatics, the ability to infer meaning beyond literal interpretation, is crucial for social cognition and communication. While LLMs have been benchmarked for their pragmatic understanding, improving their performance remains underexplored. Existing methods rely on annotated labels but overlook the reasoning process humans naturally use to interpret implicit meaning. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel pragmatic dataset, ImpliedMeaningPreference, that includes explicit reasoning (thoughts) for both correct and incorrect interpretations. Through preference-tuning and supervised fine-tuning, we demonstrate that thought-based learning significantly enhances LLMs' pragmatic understanding, improving accuracy by 11.12% across model families. We further discuss a transfer-learning study where we evaluate the performance of thought-based training for the other tasks of pragmatics (presupposition, deixis) that are not seen during the training time and observe an improvement of 16.10% compared to label-trained models.