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Instruction Tuning

Reviewed 19 July 2026Canonical definitionPart of: Agent Reliability & Deployment Terms →

Instruction tuning is a fine-tuning technique that trains a model to follow natural language instructions more reliably. It is a key step in making base models useful as agents, but instruction-following can be exploited by adversarial prompts.

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Questions

Common questions.

What is Instruction Tuning?

Instruction tuning is a fine-tuning technique that trains a model to follow natural language instructions more reliably.

How is Instruction Tuning used in production?

It is a key step in making base models useful as agents, but instruction-following can be exploited by adversarial prompts.

Which terms are related to Instruction Tuning?

Closely related concepts include Prompt Engineering, Agent Discovery, AI Agent for Code Generation, DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act). Each is defined in the Prefactor glossary.

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