Prompting & context · Glossary term
What is Instruction Following?
A model capability to map natural-language directions and supplied context to behavior that satisfies the stated task and constraints.
Why does Instruction Following matter?
Language generation can be fluent without obeying the user's requested operation, format, boundaries, or priorities.
Instruction Following in practice
Evaluate instruction adherence separately from answer quality using conflicting constraints, format requirements, irrelevant context, and refusal cases.
What is the common confusion about Instruction Following?
Instruction following is not factual correctness, alignment, or obedience to every string that looks like an instruction.
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Related terms
- SFT (Supervised Fine-Tuning)Fine-tuning a pretrained model on paired inputs and desired responses so it learns the demonstrated behavior under the training…
- Prompt EngineeringDesigning model-facing instructions, examples, constraints, and output requirements to improve behavior on a defined task.
- Instruction HierarchyA rule set for resolving conflicts among instructions from sources with different authority, such as application policy, users, and…
- AlignmentThe effort to make a model or AI system behave in ways that match intended goals, constraints, and human preferences across both expected…
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