Zero-Shot Learning

In depth

A model's ability to perform a task it was not explicitly trained on, using only the instructions in the prompt with no examples. When you ask a model to classify sentiment, translate text, or summarize an article without providing any examples, that is zero-shot learning. Modern LLMs are remarkably capable zero-shot learners because their broad training lets them generalize to new tasks from instructions alone. When zero-shot performance is insufficient, adding examples (few-shot learning) usually closes the gap.