{
  "id": "instruction-following",
  "code": "PTL-0113",
  "term": "Instruction Following",
  "aliases": [
    "instruction adherence",
    "instruction compliance"
  ],
  "category": "foundations",
  "definition": "Instruction following is a model's ability to carry out explicit instructions in a prompt, including constraints on content, length, format, and style, rather than only answering the underlying question.",
  "description": "It is the main capability added by instruction tuning and RLHF, and it degrades with long or conflicting instruction lists, long contexts, and multi-turn conversations. Benchmarks such as IFEval measure it with instructions whose compliance can be checked automatically, for example a minimum word count or a required keyword.",
  "example": "Answer in exactly three bullet points, each under 15 words, and do not use the word \"very\".",
  "broader": [],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "instruction-tuning",
    "rlhf",
    "system-prompt",
    "instruction-hierarchy"
  ],
  "introduced": null,
  "added": "2026-10-10",
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models",
      "authors": "Zhou et al.",
      "year": 2023,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07911"
    },
    {
      "title": "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback",
      "authors": "Ouyang et al.",
      "year": 2022,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02155"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/instruction-following/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Instruction Following. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0113). https://protologue.com/t/instruction-following/"
}