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A standard practice when using large language models is for users to supplement their instruction with an input context containing new information for the model to process. However, models struggle to reliably follow the input context,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Sachin Goyal , Christina Baek , J. Zico Kolter , Aditi Raghunathan

Instruction tuning is commonly assumed to endow language models with a domain-general ability to follow instructions, yet the underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. Does instruction-following rely on a universal mechanism or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Elisabetta Rocchetti , Alfio Ferrara

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haoyue Bai , Yiyou Sun , Wenjie Hu , Shi Qiu , Maggie Ziyu Huan , Peiyang Song , Robert Nowak , Dawn Song

In this work, we evaluate 10 open-source instructed LLMs on four representative code comprehension and generation tasks. We have the following main findings. First, for the zero-shot setting, instructed LLMs are very competitive on code…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Zhiqiang Yuan , Junwei Liu , Qiancheng Zi , Mingwei Liu , Xin Peng , Yiling Lou

Recently, Instruction fine-tuning has risen to prominence as a potential method for enhancing the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on novel tasks. This technique has shown an exceptional ability to boost the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Yuansheng Ni , Sichao Jiang , Xinyu wu , Hui Shen , Yuli Zhou

Instruction-tuning plays a vital role in enhancing the task-solving abilities of large language models (LLMs), improving their usability in generating helpful responses on various tasks. However, previous work has demonstrated that they are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Ahmed Alajrami , Xingwei Tan , Nikolaos Aletras

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

Instruction tuning improves the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), with data quality and scalability being the crucial factors. Most instruction tuning data come from human crowd-sourcing or GPT-4 distillation. We propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Xiang Yue , Tuney Zheng , Ge Zhang , Wenhu Chen

Instruction-tuned large language models (IT-LLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot reasoning, yet their ability to execute simple, self-contained instructions remains underexplored, despite this being foundational to complex instruction-following.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Henry Lim , Kwan Hui Lim

Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising zero-shot generalization capabilities across various downstream tasks. Recent research has introduced multimodal capabilities to LLMs by integrating independently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Utsav Garg , Erhan Bas

This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning -- finetuning language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions -- substantially…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Jason Wei , Maarten Bosma , Vincent Y. Zhao , Kelvin Guu , Adams Wei Yu , Brian Lester , Nan Du , Andrew M. Dai , Quoc V. Le

Modern language models (LMs) need to follow human instructions while being faithful; yet, they often fail to achieve both. Here, we provide concrete evidence of a trade-off between instruction following (i.e., follow open-ended…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-01 Zhengxuan Wu , Yuhao Zhang , Peng Qi , Yumo Xu , Rujun Han , Yian Zhang , Jifan Chen , Bonan Min , Zhiheng Huang

LLMs are typically trained in high-resource languages, and tasks in lower-resourced languages tend to underperform the higher-resource language counterparts for in-context learning. Despite the large body of work on prompting settings, it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Christopher Toukmaji , Jeffrey Flanigan

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 -- 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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in educational technologies for a variety of tasks, from generating instructional materials and assisting with assessment design to tutoring. While prior work has investigated how models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Kirk Vanacore , Rene F. Kizilcec

Large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities have fueled a compelling narrative that reasoning universally improves performance across language tasks. We test this claim through a comprehensive evaluation of 504 configurations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Donghao Huang , Zhaoxia Wang

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions, a.k.a. instruction-tuning, improves their zero and few-shot generalization to unseen tasks. However, there is a…

Instruction-tuning is a widely adopted finetuning method that enables large language models (LLMs) to generate output that more closely resembles human responses. However, no studies have shown that instruction-tuning actually teaches LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Khai Loong Aw , Syrielle Montariol , Badr AlKhamissi , Martin Schrimpf , Antoine Bosselut