Position, Role or Label? A Controlled Study of Instruction Conflicts in LLM Agents
arXiv:2610.33201v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents take instructions from the operator, repository configuration, user, tool results and saved memory, which often conflict. Instruction-hierarchy benchmarks ask whether the higher-ranked source wins, but a source sets position, role and label at once. First, we build WhoWins, 1,080 code-scored scenarios in five task types, each with up to five mutually exclusive instructions, and seven controlled experiments that vary only how instructions are delivered. Second, we study 14 open-weight models (0.6B to 122B, thinking off and on) over 1,88