Task Competence Is Not Instruction Following: Evaluating Instruction-Conflicting Behavior in Small Language Models

arXiv:2607.19608 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-07-21 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-07-21

Updated: 2026-10-13

Code: https://github.com/farajimahdieh/language-model-task-competence-vs-instruction-following

Terminology

• Accuracy — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Instruction Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• FinBERT: Financial Sentiment Analysis with Pre-trained Language Models
• Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge
• Qwen-Scope: Turning Sparse Features into Development Tools for Large Language Models
• Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models
• Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization
• Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models

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