# Instruction Following

> 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.

- Identifier: PTL-0113
- Category: Foundations
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/instruction-following/
- Also known as: instruction adherence, instruction compliance

## 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".
```

## Related terms

- [Instruction Tuning](https://protologue.com/t/instruction-tuning/)
- [Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://protologue.com/t/rlhf/)
- [System Prompt](https://protologue.com/t/system-prompt/)
- [Instruction Hierarchy](https://protologue.com/t/instruction-hierarchy/)

## Sources

- Zhou et al. (2023). Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07911
- Ouyang et al. (2022). Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02155

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Instruction Following. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0113). https://protologue.com/t/instruction-following/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)