zero-shot

Definition

Asking a model to perform a task from the instruction alone, with no worked examples. It measures how far pre-training generalises, and it is the practically important setting because it needs no task-specific data. The standing caveat is contamination: web-scale pre-training may already contain the task or its benchmark, in which case "zero-shot" overstates how novel the problem really is.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: SwanTale — Designing Voices from Words Alone, with Speech and Sound in One WaveformSwanTale: Unified Multi-Speaker Speech and Audio Generation for Instruct and Zero-Shot Tasks