@inproceedings{alajrami-etal-2025-fine,
    title = "Fine-Tuning on Noisy Instructions: Effects on Generalization and Performance",
    author = "Alajrami, Ahmed  and
      Tan, Xingwei  and
      Aletras, Nikolaos",
    editor = "Inui, Kentaro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Wang, Haofen  and
      Wong, Derek F.  and
      Bhattacharyya, Pushpak  and
      Banerjee, Biplab  and
      Ekbal, Asif  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Singh, Dhirendra Pratap",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Mumbai, India",
    publisher = "The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.41/",
    pages = "728--742",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-298-5",
    abstract = "Instruction-tuning plays a vital role in enhancing the task-solving abilities of large language models (LLMs), improving their usability in generating helpful responses on various tasks. However, previous work has demonstrated that they are sensitive to minor variations in instruction phrasing. In this paper, we explore whether introducing perturbations in instruction-tuning data can enhance LLMs' resistance against noisy instructions. We focus on how instruction-tuning with perturbations, such as removing stop words or shuffling words, affects LLMs' performance on the original and perturbed versions of widely-used benchmarks (MMLU, BBH, GSM8K). We further assess learning dynamics and potential shifts in model behavior. Surprisingly, our results suggest that instruction-tuning on perturbed instructions can, in some cases, improve downstream performance. These findings highlight the importance of including perturbed instructions in instruction-tuning, which can make LLMs more resilient to noisy user inputs."
}