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SPaR: Self-Play with Tree-Search Refinement to Improve Instruction-Following in Large Language Models

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arxiv 2412.11605 v2 pith:ROTVPHPN submitted 2024-12-16 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

classification cs.CLcs.AIcs.LG
keywords sparmodelmodelsinstructionpreferencetree-searchinstruction-followingintroduce
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Instruction-following is a fundamental capability of language models, requiring the model to recognize even the most subtle requirements in the instructions and accurately reflect them in its output. Such an ability is well-suited for and often optimized by preference learning. However, existing methods often directly sample multiple independent responses from the model when creating preference pairs. Such practice can introduce content variations irrelevant to whether the instruction is precisely followed (e.g., different expressions about the same semantic), interfering with the goal of teaching models to recognize the key differences that lead to improved instruction following. In light of this, we introduce SPaR, a self-play framework integrating tree-search self-refinement to yield valid and comparable preference pairs free from distractions. By playing against itself, an LLM employs a tree-search strategy to refine its previous responses with respect to the instruction while minimizing unnecessary variations. Our experiments show that a LLaMA3-8B model, trained over three iterations guided by SPaR, surpasses GPT-4-Turbo on the IFEval benchmark without losing general capabilities. Furthermore, SPaR demonstrates promising scalability, greatly enhancing models like GLM-4-9B and LLaMA3-70B. We also identify how inference scaling in tree search would impact model performance. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/thu-coai/SPaR.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

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  1. Skill Self-Play: Pushing the Frontier of LLM Capability with Co-Evolving Skills

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Skill Self-Play uses an evolving skill library to guide LLM self-training, improving tool-call and reasoning accuracy beyond unguided self-play on five model backbones.

  2. Anchored Self-Play for Code Repair

    cs.SE 2026-07 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

    Anchored Self-Play uses a small reference bug set and code-embedding similarity to stop generator–fixer self-play from drifting into unrealistic bugs, raising average fix rate by 7.0 points on BugSourceBench.

  3. SEIF: Self-Evolving Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following

    cs.CL 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    SEIF creates a self-reinforcing loop in which an LLM alternately generates increasingly difficult instructions and learns to follow them better using reinforcement learning signals from its own judgments.

  4. Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models

    cs.AI 2025-03 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    The paper unifies perspectives on Long CoT in reasoning LLMs by introducing a taxonomy, detailing characteristics of deep reasoning and reflection, and discussing emergence phenomena and future directions.

  5. From System 1 to System 2: A Survey of Reasoning Large Language Models

    cs.AI 2025-02 accept novelty 3.0 of 10

    The survey organizes the shift of LLMs toward deliberate System 2 reasoning, covering model construction techniques, performance on math and coding benchmarks, and future research directions.

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