Supervised Fine-Tuning

Teaching by demonstration: instruction data, chat templates, the training recipe — and why data quality beats quantity.

Content last verified 2026-09.

Lessons

1. Instruction Data: Teaching by Demonstration
2. The Training Recipe
3. Quality Beats Quantity
4. The Limits of Imitation

Sources

• Ouyang et al. (2022) — Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (InstructGPT)
• Wei et al. (2021) — Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners (FLAN)
• Wang et al. (2022) — Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions
• Zhou et al. (2023) — LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment