1 Introduction
2 Related Work
2.1 Instruction Following
2.2 Surveys on In-context Instructions
3 Preliminary
4 What is Task Instruction?—A Unified Perspective from Indirect Supervision
4.1 Three Types of Instructions
4.2 An Indirect Supervision Perspective
5 How to Model Instructions?
5.1 Semantic Parser
5.2 Flatten-and-Concatenation
5.3 Hyper Network
5.4 Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
6 Instruction Following Dataset and Evaluation
6.1 Dataset
6.2 Evaluation
7 Factors that Influence Instruction Following Performance
7.1 Model-related Factors
7.2 Instruction-related Factors
7.3 Demonstration-related Factors
7.4 Model-Instruction Alignment
7.5 Data-wise Factor: Task Scale
7.6 Main Takeaway: Dual-Track Scaling
8 Challenges and Future Directions
8.1 The Tax of Instruction Alignment
8.2 Learning Negated Information
8.3 Adversarial Instruction Attacks
8.4 Explainability of Instruction Following
8.5 Learning to Follow Instruction rather than Merely Generating Y
8.6 Multilingual Instruction Following
9 Instruction-related Applications
9.1 Human-Computer Interaction
9.2 Data and Feature Augmentation
9.3 Generalist Language Models
10 Conclusion