A training step for teaching a model to follow requests better.
Instruction tuning is like training a golden retriever with homework. You say “summarize this,” and it learns not to bring you a tennis ball.
It turns a base model into a better helper. You meet it inside chatbots and AI assistants.
Pretraining
After Pretraining, instruction tuning teaches the model to follow requests.
Fine-tuning
Instruction tuning is a common kind of Fine-tuning.
RLHF
Instruction tuning teaches request-following before RLHF teaches preferences.
Base model
Instruction tuning turns a Base model into a better chat helper.