Zero-shot Learning

Techniques

Simple Definition

Asking an AI to perform a task it wasn't explicitly trained on, relying solely on its general capabilities.

Full Explanation

Zero-shot means giving the model no examples — just a description of the task. 'Classify this review as positive, negative, or neutral' without showing any labeled examples. Modern LLMs perform remarkably well zero-shot on many tasks due to their vast training data. Zero-shot is cheaper than few-shot (no examples in prompt) and often sufficient for standard tasks.

Related Terms

Few-shot Learning

Providing a small number of input-output examples in the prompt to guide the AI's response format and style.

Prompt Engineering

The practice of crafting inputs to AI models to reliably get better, more accurate, or more specific outputs.

Last verified: 2026-03-30← Back to Glossary