# Revealing the Inherent Instructability of Pre-Trained Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02465 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02465/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04249/) (2024)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [Length-Controlled AlpacaEval: A Simple Way to Debias Automatic Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04475/) (2024)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14233/) (2023)
- [OpenAssistant Conversations -- Democratizing Large Language Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07327/) (2023)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [WildChat: 1M ChatGPT Interaction Logs in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01470/) (2024)
- [OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00838/) (2024)
- [LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11998/) (2023)
- [Catastrophic Jailbreak of Open-source LLMs via Exploiting Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06987/) (2023)
- [How Far Can Camels Go? Exploring the State of Instruction Tuning on Open Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04751/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Instruction tuning -- supervised fine-tuning using instruction-response pairs -- is a key step in making pre-trained large language models (LLMs) instructable. Meanwhile, LLMs perform multitask learning during their pre-training, acquiring extensive knowledge and capabilities. We hypothesize that the pre-training stage can enable them to develop the ability to comprehend and address instructions. To verify this, we propose Response Tuning (RT), which removes the instruction and its corresponding mapping to the response from instruction tuning. Instead, it focuses solely on establishing a response distribution. Our experiments demonstrate that RT models, trained only on responses, can effectively respond to a wide range of instructions akin to their instruction-tuned counterparts. In addition, we observe that the models can recognize and reject unsafe queries after learning a safety policy only from the response data. Furthermore, we find that these observations extend to an in-context learning setting. These findings support our hypothesis, highlighting the extensive inherent capabilities of pre-trained LLMs.