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Training Updated 2026

Fine-Tuning

Continuing to train a pre-trained model on additional, specialised data so it adapts to a domain, task or style without being built from scratch.

Fine-tuning takes a model that already understands language and nudges its weights on a smaller, targeted dataset. Howard & Ruder (2018) established the modern transfer-learning recipe for NLP with ULMFiT, and Devlin et al. (2019) made pre-train-then-fine-tune the dominant paradigm with BERT.

Compared with prompting, fine-tuning can bake in a behaviour permanently and cheaply at inference — at the cost of a training run and a dataset to maintain.

References

Primary, peer-reviewed and archival sources for this definition.

Universal Language Model Fine-tuning for Text Classification
Howard, J., & Ruder, S. (2018). Proceedings of ACL 2018, pp. 328–339.
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2019.

Dictionary & encyclopedic entries

Cite this entry

MultipleChat. "Fine-Tuning." MultipleChat AI & LLM Glossary, 2026. https://multiple.chat/ai-glossary/fine-tuning

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