# Fine-tuning

A further round of training that adapts a pretrained model to specific tasks or a particular domain.

NIST (AI 100-2e2025, Adversarial Machine Learning glossary) says: “The process of adapting a pre-trained model to perform specific tasks or specialize in a particular domain. This phase follows the initial pre-training phase and involves further training the model on task-specific data. This is often a supervised learning task.”

Fine-tuning is one kind of post-training. Post-training usually means what the model maker does; fine-tuning usually means further training that anyone, often a customer, does for a task or domain. Fine-tuning changes how a model behaves and writes. It is a poor way to add facts that change often; RAG handles that better.

Kind of: Training

The other half: RAG

Source: https://redfinchadvisory.com/lexicon/fine-tuning (version 1.0, changed 2026-10-21)