Self-play with Execution Feedback: Improving Instruction-following
  Capabilities of Large Language Models
Authors: name: Guanting Dong, name: Keming Lu, name: Chengpeng Li, name: Tingyu Xia, name: Bowen Yu, name: Chang Zhou, name: Jingren Zhou

One core capability of large language models (LLMs) is to follow natural
language instructions. However, the issue of automatically constructing
high-quality training data to enhance the complex instruction-following
abilities of LLMs without manual annotation remains unresolved. In this paper,
we introduce AutoIF, the first scalable and reliable method for automatically
generating instruction-following training data. AutoIF transforms the
validation of instruction-following data quality into code verification,
requiring LLMs to generate instructions, the corresponding code to check the
correctness of the instruction responses, and unit test samples to verify the
code's correctness. Then, execution feedback-based rejection sampling can
generate data for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from
Human Feedback (RLHF) training. AutoIF achieves significant improvements across
three training algorithms, SFT, Offline DPO, and Online DPO, when applied to
the top open-source LLMs, Qwen2 and LLaMA3, in self-alignment and
strong-to-weak distillation settings. Our code is publicly available at
https://github.com/QwenLM/AutoIF.