Data
Alpaca format
Also called Instruct format.
What is alpaca format?
The Alpaca format stores each example as an instruction, an optional input, and an output. It suits single-turn task data and is simpler than conversation formats, at the cost of being unable to represent multi-turn dialogue.
For classification, extraction and transformation tasks, single-turn structure is a good fit and the simplicity is a virtue: fewer fields means fewer ways to build the dataset wrongly.
It converts cleanly into conversation formats — instruction becomes a user message, output becomes an assistant message — which is why pipelines accept it as a source format even when they train on something else.
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