DadgogoAI Dictionary

Dictionary entry

instruction tuning

noun \in-ˈstrək-shən ˈtü-niŋ\

also supervised fine-tuning or SFT

TopicTraining First known use2021 Senses1

Definition of instruction tuning

  1. : fine-tuning a base model on examples of instructions paired with good responses, so it learns to follow requests instead of just continuing text

    • Instruction tuning turned the base model into a usable assistant.
    • Even a few thousand high-quality examples make instruction tuning work.
Advertisement

Origin & history

first known use2021

Became a standard step in 2021 and 2022 with research such as Google's FLAN and OpenAI's InstructGPT.

Test yourself

Which of these is the meaning of instruction tuning?

Related terms

base model a language model that has only been pre-trained, not yet tuned to follow instructions or chat… fine-tuning further training of an existing model on a smaller, focused dataset so it gets better at a… RLHF reinforcement learning from human feedback: a training method in which people rate or compare… post-training everything done to a model after pre-training to make it useful and safe, such as instruction…

Cite this entry

"Instruction tuning." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/instruction-tuning/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2026.

Dictionary entries near instruction tuning

Advertisement