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Instruction tuning is a pivotal technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, safety constraints, and domain-specific requirements. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the full pipeline,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Xudong Han , Junjie Yang , Tianyang Wang , Ziqian Bi , Xinyuan Song , Junfeng Hao , Junhao Song

By pretraining on trillions of tokens, an LLM gains the capability of text generation. However, to enhance its utility and reduce potential harm, SFT and alignment are applied sequentially to the pretrained model. Because SFT and alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zhichao Wang , Bin Bi , Zixu Zhu , Xiangbo Mao , Jun Wang , Shiyu Wang , Cheng Wang , Dong Nie , Lingzi Hong

The alignments of reasoning abilities between smaller and larger Language Models are largely conducted via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using demonstrations generated from robust Large Language Models (LLMs). Although these approaches…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Leonardo Ranaldi , Andrè Freitas

Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) elicits instruction following capabilities and steers the behavior of large language models (LLMs) via supervised learning. However, existing models trained on open-source IFT datasets only have the ability to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Kuan Wang , Alexander Bukharin , Haoming Jiang , Qingyu Yin , Zhengyang Wang , Tuo Zhao , Jingbo Shang , Chao Zhang , Bing Yin , Xian Li , Jianshu Chen , Shiyang Li

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) can cause them to lose their general capabilities. However, the intrinsic mechanisms behind such forgetting remain unexplored. In this paper, we begin by examining this phenomenon by focusing on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Gangwei Jiang , Zhaoyi Li , Defu Lian , Ying Wei

Reasoning is a cognitive process of using evidence to reach a sound conclusion. The reasoning capability is essential for large language models (LLMs) to serve as the brain of the artificial general intelligence agent. Recent studies reveal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Peiyi Wang , Lei Li , Liang Chen , Feifan Song , Binghuai Lin , Yunbo Cao , Tianyu Liu , Zhifang Sui

In-context Learning (ICL) utilizes structured demonstration-query inputs to induce few-shot learning on Language Models (LMs), which are not originally pre-trained on ICL-style data. To bridge the gap between ICL and pre-training, some…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Hakaze Cho , Peng Luo , Mariko Kato , Rin Kaenbyou , Naoya Inoue

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary success across various text generation tasks; however, their potential for simple yet essential text classification remains underexplored, as LLM pre-training tends to emphasize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Zhexiong Liu , Diane Litman

Large language models (LLMs) with one or more fine-tuning phases have become a necessary step to unlock various capabilities, enabling LLMs to follow natural language instructions or align with human preferences. However, it carries the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Tingfeng Hui , Zhenyu Zhang , Shuohuan Wang , Weiran Xu , Yu Sun , Hua Wu

Despite the strong performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex instruction-following tasks, precise control of output length remains a persistent challenge. Existing methods primarily attempt to enforce length constraints by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Wei Zhang , Lintong Du , Yuanhe Zhang , Zhenhong Zhou , Kun Wang , Li Sun , Sen Su

Large language models (LLMs) encode extensive world knowledge through pre-training on massive datasets, which can then be fine-tuned for the question-answering (QA) task. However, effective strategies for fine-tuning LLMs for the QA task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Junjie Ye , Yuming Yang , Qi Zhang , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Peng Wang , Zhongchao Shi , Jianping Fan

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is a popular class of techniques that strive to adapt large models in a scalable and resource-efficient manner. Yet, the mechanisms underlying their training performance and generalization remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zahra Rahimi Afzal , Tara Esmaeilbeig , Mojtaba Soltanalian , Mesrob I. Ohannessian

During the pretraining phase, large language models (LLMs) acquire vast amounts of knowledge from extensive text corpora. Nevertheless, in later stages such as fine-tuning and inference, the model may encounter knowledge not covered in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Bozhou Li , Hao Liang , Yang Li , Fangcheng Fu , Hongzhi Yin , Conghui He , Wentao Zhang

Instruction Tuning (IT), the process of training large language models (LLMs) using instruction-response pairs, has emerged as the predominant method for transforming base pre-trained LLMs into open-domain conversational agents. While IT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Sreyan Ghosh , Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru , Sonal Kumar , Ramaneswaran S , Deepali Aneja , Zeyu Jin , Ramani Duraiswami , Dinesh Manocha

Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), or providing context on the expected model of operation, is an effective way to steer the outputs of such models to satisfy human desiderata after they have been trained. But in rapidly evolving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Younwoo Choi , Muhammad Adil Asif , Ziwen Han , John Willes , Rahul G. Krishnan

Adhering to explicit length constraints, such as generating text with a precise word count, remains a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). This study aims at investigating the differences between foundation models and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Elisabetta Rocchetti , Alfio Ferrara

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…

Instruction tuning -- supervised fine-tuning using instruction-response pairs -- is a key step in making pre-trained large language models (LLMs) instructable. Meanwhile, LLMs perform multitask learning during their pre-training, acquiring…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Seokhyun An , Minji Kim , Hyounghun Kim

Post-training has demonstrated its importance in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The primary post-training methods can be categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mingyang Liu , Gabriele Farina , Asuman Ozdaglar

Instruction tuning, a specialized technique to enhance large language model (LLM) performance via instruction datasets, relies heavily on the quality of employed data. Existing quality improvement methods alter instruction data through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-29 Yang Xu , Yongqiang Yao , Yufan Huang , Mengnan Qi , Maoquan Wang , Bin Gu , Neel Sundaresan