All terms
Prompting
Instruction Following
A model's ability to understand a request and carry out what it asks.
Definition
Instruction following is a model's ability to read a task described in natural language and do what it asks, rather than simply continuing the text. This behavior is instilled mainly through instruction tuning, where a base model is fine-tuned on many request-and-response pairs. Reliable instruction following is what lets people steer a model with plain directions, and it underpins most prompting techniques.