# Demystifying Instruction Mixing for Fine-tuning Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.10793 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10793/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [RACE: Large-scale ReAding Comprehension Dataset From Examinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04683/) (2017)
- [Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14233/) (2023)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [MAmmoTH: Building Math Generalist Models through Hybrid Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05653/) (2023)
- [How Far Can Camels Go? Exploring the State of Instruction Tuning on Open Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04751/) (2023)
- [FLASK: Fine-grained Language Model Evaluation based on Alignment Skill Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10928/) (2023)
- [LaMini-LM: A Diverse Herd of Distilled Models from Large-Scale Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14402/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Does Math Reasoning Improve General LLM Capabilities? Understanding Transferability of LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00432/) (2025)
- [Influence-Preserving Proxies for Gradient-Based Data Selection in LLM Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17835/) (2026)
- [Towards Alignment-Centric Paradigm: A Survey of Instruction Tuning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17184/) (2025)
- [Beyond Monolingual Assumptions: A Survey of Code-Switched NLP in the Era of Large Language Models across Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07037/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Instruction tuning significantly enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) across various tasks. However, the procedure to optimizing the mixing of instruction datasets for LLM fine-tuning is still poorly understood. This study categorizes instructions into three primary types: NLP downstream tasks, coding, and general chat. We explore the effects of instruction tuning on different combinations of datasets on LLM performance, and find that certain instruction types are more advantageous for specific applications but can negatively impact other areas. This work provides insights into instruction mixtures, laying the foundations for future research.