IHDec: Divergence-Steered Contrastive Decoding for Securing Multi-Turn Instruction Hierarchies

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail to maintain instruction hierarchies (IH) when processing multi-source inputs with varying role-level priorities, paradoxically adhering to lower-priority directives during conflicts. While existing defenses mitigate this issue, they are largely restricted to single-turn scenarios and require expensive fine-tuning. In this paper, we formalize this failure mode in multi-turn contexts via a Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) framework, uncovering a pervasive role-influence inversion phenomenon where subordinate inputs override superior roles. To rectify this without training, we propose IHDec (Instruction Hierarchy-steered Decoding). IHDec leverages JSD to automatically detect token-level hierarchy violations and dynamically executes contrastive decoding to suppress misaligned subordinate roles. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that IHDec outperforms training-based baselines in multi-turn conflicts while fully preserving general response quality. Furthermore, IHDec strengthens safety against adversarial prompt injections and exhibits a robust scaling synergy with larger models. The Code is available at https://github.com/nxcolelxu/IHDec.git