Related papers: What Makes Good Data for Alignment? A Comprehensiv…

Aligning the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences (e.g., by means of reinforcement learning with human feedback, or RLHF) is essential for ensuring their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Despite significant…

Large Language Models (LLMs) for public use require continuous pre-training to remain up-to-date with the latest data. The models also need to be fine-tuned with specific instructions to maintain their ability to follow instructions…

This paper surveys research works in the quickly advancing field of instruction tuning (IT), which can also be referred to as supervised fine-tuning (SFT)\footnote{In this paper, unless specified otherwise, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and…

Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task. Despite growing interest, the literature on…

Finetuning foundation models for specific tasks is an emerging paradigm in modern machine learning. The efficacy of task-specific finetuning largely depends on the selection of appropriate training data. We present TSDS (Task-Specific Data…

High-quality instruction data is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs). Although some models, such as Llama-3-Instruct, have open weights, their alignment data remain private, which hinders the democratization of AI. High human…

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as LLaVA-series models, are driven by massive machine-generated instruction-following data tuning. Such automatic instruction collection pipelines, however, inadvertently…

Proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have garnered significant attention due to their exceptional capabilities in handling a diverse range of tasks. Recent studies demonstrate that open-sourced smaller foundational…

We present a scalable method to build a high quality instruction following language model by automatically labelling human-written text with corresponding instructions. Our approach, named instruction backtranslation, starts with a language…

Alignment is a crucial step to enhance the instruction-following and conversational abilities of language models. Despite many recent work proposing new algorithms, datasets, and training pipelines, there is a lack of comprehensive studies…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human instructions. The primary goal during SFT is to select a small yet representative subset of training data from the larger pool, such that…

Instruction tuning has been proven effective in enhancing zero-shot generalization across various tasks and in improving the performance of specific tasks. For task-specific improvements, strategically selecting and training on related…

Every data selection method inherently has a target. In practice, these targets often emerge implicitly through benchmark-driven iteration: researchers develop selection strategies, train models, measure benchmark performance, then refine…

To acquire instruction-following capabilities, large language models (LLMs) undergo instruction tuning, where they are trained on instruction-response pairs using next-token prediction (NTP). Efforts to improve instruction tuning often…

Instruction Tuning involves finetuning a language model on a collection of instruction-formatted datasets in order to enhance the generalizability of the model to unseen tasks. Studies have shown the importance of balancing different task…

Instruction tuning is essential for Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively follow user instructions. To improve training efficiency and reduce data redundancy, recent works use LLM-based scoring functions, e.g., Instruction-Following…

A practical approach to activate long chain-of-thoughts reasoning ability in pre-trained large language models is to perform supervised fine-tuning on instruction datasets synthesized by strong Large Reasoning Models such as DeepSeek-R1,…

Instruction tuning is crucial for enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve real-world tasks. Prior work has shown the effectiveness of instruction-tuning data synthesized solely from LLMs, raising a fundamental question: Do we still…

Data selection in instruction tuning emerges as a pivotal process for acquiring high-quality data and training instruction-following large language models (LLMs), but it is still a new and unexplored research area for vision-language models…

Alignment in large language models (LLMs) is still largely static: after training, the policy is frozen. DPO, GRPO methods typically imprint one behavior into the weights, leaving little runtime control beyond prompt hacks or expensive…