Pay Attention to What Matters

Abstract: Despite the remarkable success of LLMs, they still exhibit a limited capability to align their outputs to the user instructions. In this work, we introduce a simple and effective method, which we name GUIDE, that mechanistically increases attention scores in instruction tokens. To support this operation, we present Influence, a novel metric that highlights how the user's instructions propagate through the transformer layers and impact the LLM output. Our results show that GUIDE improves the accuracy of following instructions 29.4 % to 60.4%, outperforming natural prompting alternatives and Supervised Fine-Tuning up to 1M tokens.