v2026.1CASRAI Dictionary 1,610 entries across 24 domains · CC-BY 4.01,610 entries · CC-BY 4.0

Dictionary termTrack AStablev2026.2

Fine-tuning

The process of further training a pre-trained foundation model on a smaller, task-specific or domain-specific dataset, updating some or all parameters, to specialise its behaviour while retaining general capability.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

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Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
LoRA fine-tuning of Llama 3 on a corpus of cardiology guidelines to build a domain assistant

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
Few-shot prompting (showing examples in the prompt) is not fine-tuning — model weights are unchanged

Editorial commentary

Variants include full fine-tuning, parameter-efficient methods (LoRA, adapters), instruction tuning, and RLHF. For scholarly disclosure, the base model, fine-tuning data, and method should be reported; fine-tuning materially changes what the model can be expected to do.

References

Howard and Ruder 2018 ‘Universal Language Model Fine-tuning’ ACL
Hu et al. 2022 ‘LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation’ ICLR

Also known as

Model adaptation · Domain adaptation (LLM)

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Fine-tuning"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/fine-tuning" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/fine-tuning",
  "name": "Fine-tuning",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/fine-tuning",
  "description": "The process of further training a pre-trained foundation model on a smaller, task-specific or domain-specific dataset, updating some or all parameters, to specialise its behaviour while retaining general capability.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/genai-disclosure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/fine-tuning",
  "sameAs": [
    "Model adaptation",
    "Domain adaptation (LLM)"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T01:57:28",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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