What is Zero-Shot Learning?

Zero-Shot Learning

Definition A model's ability to perform a task it has never seen examples of, relying entirely on instructions and pre-trained knowledge. Zero-shot capability indicates that a model has learned robust enough representations to generalize to novel problem types.

In Depth

Zero-shot prompting is the simplest and fastest form of LLM use: you describe the task and the model attempts it without examples. Larger, better-instruction-tuned models tend to have stronger zero-shot performance. Benchmarks like MMLU and BIG-Bench measure zero-shot and few-shot capabilities across hundreds of academic and professional domains.

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