Instruction Tuning
A fine-tuning process that trains a language model to follow natural language commands and instructions, bridging the gap between text completion and dialogue.
Think of It Like This
Like sending a brilliant but rambling philosopher to a boot camp to learn how to answer direct questions clearly.
Standard pre-trained models predict the next word, but instruction tuning aligns them to act as helpful assistants. It uses datasets consisting of diverse tasks formatted as instruction-response pairs. This is a critical step in producing modern chatbots, often followed by RLHF to further refine human alignment.