zero

Definition

Usually a prefix meaning "with no examples": zero-shot evaluation asks a model to perform a task it was never explicitly trained for, given only an instruction. It contrasts with few-shot, where a handful of demonstrations sit in the prompt, and the gap between the two says something about what the model already knew. Beware the acronym ZeRO in distributed-training papers, which is unrelated and refers to sharding optimiser state across devices.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough — J-Zero: Growing the Challenger, the Solver, and the Judge Together from Zero DataJ-Zero: Unified Challenger--Solver--Judge Co-Evolution from Zero Data
• 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