AI Glossary Term

What does “Zero-Shot Learning” mean?

Definition

Solving tasks without task-specific examples by relying on prior general knowledge.

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How Zero-Shot Learning works

Example

You ask a language model, 'Classify this review as positive or negative', with no examples. It does it correctly because its pre-training already covered similar tasks.

Why it matters

It lets you try new tasks quickly. Accuracy is usually lower than with examples or fine-tuning, so verify the results.

Common questions

Zero-shot vs few-shot?

Zero-shot gives no examples; few-shot includes a handful in the prompt.

How does it work?

Skills and knowledge learned during pre-training generalize to new instructions.

When does it fail?

On unusual tasks or ambiguous instructions, where examples would clarify what is wanted.

Continual LearningTraining approaches that let a model keep learning from new data without forgetting prior knowledge.AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)A hypothetical AI system that can perform most intellectual tasks at a human level across many domains.Few-Shot LearningLearning or adapting behavior from only a small number of examples.Fine-TuningContinuing training on domain-specific data to adapt a pre-trained model to a specific task.Transfer LearningApplying knowledge learned in one task or domain to improve another task.Prompt TemplateA reusable prompt pattern with variables, formatting rules, and task-specific instructions.

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