🛡️
Session Flagged

Your session has been flagged for unusual activity.

You can try our app by searching for MultipleChat AI on Google and clicking the multiplechat.ai link to try it free.
Quick verification

Please confirm you're human to continue.


TrainingAlignment Updated 2026

Instruction Tuning

Fine-tuning a model on many tasks phrased as natural-language instructions, so it follows new instructions well even on tasks it never saw in training.

Instruction tuning fine-tunes a base model on a large collection of tasks expressed as instructions. Wei et al. (2022) showed in FLAN that this sharply improves zero-shot performance on unseen tasks, and Ouyang et al. (2022) combined instruction data with human feedback to build InstructGPT — the recipe that turned raw language models into helpful assistants.

It is the step that makes a model good at doing what it is told, rather than merely continuing text.

References

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

Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners (FLAN)
Wei, J., Bosma, M., Zhao, V. Y., Guu, K., Yu, A. W., Lester, B., Du, N., Dai, A. M., & Le, Q. V. (2022). International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2022).
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
Ouyang, L., Wu, J., Jiang, X., Almeida, D., Wainwright, C. L., et al. (2022). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022).

Dictionary & encyclopedic entries

Cite this entry

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

Related terms

See this in practice

Run the same prompt across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok — grounded in your own sources, cross-checked against each other.

Try MultipleChat Free

Continue learning

See paid plans