Concept

Instruction Following

The capability of an LLM to interpret and execute natural-language directions reliably.

Definition

Instruction following is the behaviour produced by instruction tuning plus RLHF: the model interprets prompts as commands rather than completions to continue. Benchmarks like IFEval and MT-Bench specifically measure it.

Common use cases

  • Chat agents
  • Tool agents
  • Workflow automation

Related terms

    Instruction Following — AI Glossary | Railwail