instruct

Definition

A suffix on model names marking the instruction-tuned variant. A base model only continues text, so asking it a question often yields more questions; supervised fine-tuning on instruction-response pairs, usually followed by preference-based alignment, is what turns it into something that answers. Base and instruct checkpoints from the same family behave differently enough that benchmark numbers are not interchangeable, so always check which one a result refers to.

Explainers using this term

• Building a Dataset in Practice — Collect, Clean, BlendSelf-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions
• Paper Walkthrough: SwanTale — Designing Voices from Words Alone, with Speech and Sound in One WaveformSwanTale: Unified Multi-Speaker Speech and Audio Generation for Instruct and Zero-Shot Tasks