AI engineering glossary · LLM training alignment
What is instruction tuning?
Instruction tuning (also called Instruction fine-tuning): Fine-tuning a base model on many examples of instructions paired with good responses, across varied task types, so it learns to follow directions given in plain language. It turns a text-continuer into an assistant-like model and helps it generalise to instructions it has never seen.
Instruction tuning: an example
A dataset of 50,000 pairs such as 'Translate this to Tamil: ...' with the correct translation, 'Summarise this email' with a summary, and so on.
Related terms
More LLM training alignment terms
- Kahneman-Tversky optimisation
- KL penalty
- Knowledge distillation
- LIMA
- Long-context fine-tuning
- LoRA
- Loss masking
- Loss spike
Where you learn it
Instruction tuning is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.