IF-RewardBench: Benchmarking Judge Models for Instruction-Following Evaluation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04738v1
• Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:21:17 GMT
• Title: IF-RewardBench: Benchmarking Judge Models for Instruction-Following Evaluation
• Authors: Bosi Wen, Yilin Niu, Cunxiang Wang, Xiaoying Ling, Ying Zhang, Pei Ke, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang,
• Abstract summary: We propose IF-RewardBench, a comprehensive meta-evaluation benchmark for instruction-following.<n>For each instruction, we construct a preference graph containing all pairwise preferences among multiple responses.<n>Experiments on IF-RewardBench reveal significant deficiencies in current judge models.
• Score: 85.56193980646981
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Instruction-following is a foundational capability of large language models (LLMs), with its improvement hinging on scalable and accurate feedback from judge models. However, the reliability of current judge models in instruction-following remains underexplored due to several deficiencies of existing meta-evaluation benchmarks, such as their insufficient data coverage and oversimplified pairwise evaluation paradigms that misalign with model optimization scenarios. To this end, we propose IF-RewardBench, a comprehensive meta-evaluation benchmark for instruction-following that covers diverse instruction and constraint types. For each instruction, we construct a preference graph containing all pairwise preferences among multiple responses based on instruction-following quality. This design enables a listwise evaluation paradigm that assesses the capabilities of judge models to rank multiple responses, which is essential in guiding model alignment. Extensive experiments on IF-RewardBench reveal significant deficiencies in current judge models and demonstrate that our benchmark achieves a stronger positive correlation with downstream task performance compared to existing benchmarks. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/thu-coai/IF-RewardBench.

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