Revisiting Instruction Fine-tuned Model Evaluation to Guide Industrial Applications

Abstract: Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) is a powerful paradigm that strengthens the zero-shot capabilities of LLMs, but in doing so induces new evaluation metric requirements. We show LLM-based metrics to be well adapted to these requirements, and leverage them to conduct an investigation of task-specialization strategies, quantifying the trade-offs that emerge in practical industrial settings. Our findings offer practitioners actionable insights for real-world IFT model deployment.