cs.CLMar 5, 2026

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

Organizations: The Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CoAI) Group, Tsinghua University · Zhipu AI · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

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.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables16 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. RubricEval: A Rubric-Level Meta-Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Judges in Instruction Following

    Mar 26, 2026Tianjun Pan, Xuan Lin, Wenyan Yang +7Rubric-Based EvaluationLLM-as-a-Judge

  2. MCJudgeBench: A Benchmark for Constraint-Level Judge Evaluation in Multi-Constraint Instruction Following

    May 5, 2026Jaeyun Lee, Junyoung Koh, Zeynel Tok +2LLM EvaluationLLM-as-a-Judge