GuideBench: Benchmarking Domain-Oriented Guideline Following for LLM Agents

Lingxiao Diao, Xinyue Xu, Wanxuan Sun, Cheng Yang, Zhuosheng Zhang


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed as autonomous agents capable of following user instructions and making decisions in real-world applications. Previous studies have made notable progress in benchmarking the instruction following capabilities of LLMs in general domains, with a primary focus on their inherent commonsense knowledge. Recently, LLMs have been increasingly deployed as domain-oriented agents, which rely on domain-oriented guidelines that may conflict with their commonsense knowledge. These guidelines exhibit two key characteristics: they consist of a wide range of domain-oriented rules and are subject to frequent updates. Despite these challenges, the absence of comprehensive benchmarks for evaluating the domain-oriented guideline following capabilities of LLMs presents a significant obstacle to their effective assessment and further development. In this paper, we introduce GuideBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate guideline following performance of LLMs. GuideBench evaluates LLMs on three critical aspects: (i) adherence to diverse rules, (ii) robustness to rule updates, and (iii) alignment with human preferences. Experimental results on a range of LLMs indicate substantial opportunities for improving their ability to follow domain-oriented guidelines. Data and code are available at Anonymous.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.557
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11361–11399
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.557/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lingxiao Diao, Xinyue Xu, Wanxuan Sun, Cheng Yang, and Zhuosheng Zhang. 2025. GuideBench: Benchmarking Domain-Oriented Guideline Following for LLM Agents. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 11361–11399, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GuideBench: Benchmarking Domain-Oriented Guideline Following for LLM Agents (Diao et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.557.pdf