Instruction-Tuning Papers

Zhang et al 2023 - Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey

Mishra et al 2021 - Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions

Wei et al 2021 - Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners

Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization

ZeroPrompt: Scaling Prompt-Based Pretraining to 1,000 Tasks Improves Zero-Shot Generalization

InstructGPT paper: Ouyang et al 2022 - Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback This is essentially inverse-reinforcement learning (such as this) applied to LMs

Wong et al 2022 - Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks

FLAN-T5: Chung et al 2022 - Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models

Unnatural Instructions: Tuning Language Models with (Almost) No Human Labor - Problem with this paper: it might be extracting instructions that were used to train davinci-002, so it's actually using the human labor that was used to create the davinci-002 instructions.

Longpre et al 2023 - The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning Two-column version here

Zhou et al 2023 - LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment Demonstrates that strong performance can be achieved by fine-tuning on 1,000 carefully curated training examples.

Wang et al 2023 - Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions

RSO: Liu et al 2023 - Statistical Rejection Sampling Improves Preference Optimization Uses rejection sampling with CE loss. Sample outputs, and accept or reject them based on the reward. Then fine-tune on the accepted ones use CE loss. Very principled, easy to implement. Says they get a benefit over DPO by using a reward model.

Wu et al 2023 - From Language Modeling to Instruction Following: Understanding the Behavior Shift in LLMs after Instruction Tuning

Sun et al 2023 - SALMON: Self-Alignment with Principle-Following Reward Models

DPO: Rafailov et al 2023 - Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model

Zhang et al 2023 - R-Tuning: Instructing Large Language Models to Say `I Don't Know'

Xiong et al 2023 - Iterative Preference Learning from Human Feedback: Bridging Theory and Practice for RLHF under KL-constraint Talks about “it is also common to query human feedback during the training process. For instance, Bai et al. (2022); Touvron et al. (2023) typically iterate the RLHF process on a weekly cadence, where the fresh RLHF models are deployed to interact with crowdworkers and to collect new human preference data.”

Ethayarajh et al 2024 - KTO: Model Alignment as Prospect Theoretic Optimization

Ahmadian et al 2024 - Back to Basics: Revisiting REINFORCE-Style Optimization for Learning from Human Feedback in LLMs arXiv version Shows that “PPO is not the right tool for doing RL in RLHF” and that “PPO is unnecessarily complicated for a pre-trained LLM environment.”

Xu et al 2024 - Is DPO Superior to PPO for LLM Alignment? A Comprehensive Study

Gorbatovski et al 2024 - Learn Your Reference Model for Real Good Alignment Says you can update the reference model even in DPO (making DPO similar to PPO)

Zheng et al 2023 - GPT-Fathom: Benchmarking Large Language Models to Decipher the Evolutionary Path towards GPT-4 and Beyond

Chowdhury 2024 - Provably Robust DPO: Aligning Language Models with Noisy Feedback

Hong et al 2024 - ORPO: Monolithic Preference Optimization without Reference Model Similar to SimPO, below

Meng et al 2024 - SimPO: Simple Preference Optimization with a Reference-Free Reward Similar to ORPO, above

Ivison et al 2024 - Unpacking DPO and PPO: Disentangling Best Practices for Learning from Preference Feedback

Wang et al 2024 - Self-Training with Direct Preference Optimization Improves Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Does iterative DPO training, Llama 3.1 does this as well (see post-training section 4, Figure 7)

Yuan et al 2024 - Self-Rewarding Language Models From a seed instruction-tuned model, can create more instruction tuning data

Wu et al 2025 - Improved Representation Steering for Language Models Called steering, but actually instruction tuning

Alpaca: Leaderboard

LIMA

Super-NaturalInstructions: website

Links to (almost) all instruction tuning datasets website

Aya paper

ShareGPT: HuggingFace

OpenHermes: HuggingFace

Tulu (this one is really good): HuggingFace

FLAN-T5

Alpaca

LIMA

Swaroop Mishra

Alignment

Human-In-The-Loop

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

RLHF