instruction tuning

A form of fine-tuning that improves a generative AI model's ability to follow instructions. Instruction tuning involves training a model on a series of instruction prompts, typically covering a wide variety of tasks. The resulting instruction-tuned model then tends to generate useful responses to zero-shot prompts across a variety of tasks. Compare and contrast with: - parameter-efficient tuning - prompt tuning

Practitioners refer to instruction tuning when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.