Zero-Shot Learning

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Overview

Zero-shot learning studies how models can handle unseen classes, tasks, domains, or settings without labeled examples for the target. Traditional visual methods align image features with attributes or text embeddings, while newer approaches use vision-language models, large language models, prompt design, generated features, and test-time adaptation. Evaluation ranges from class-recognition benchmarks such as CUB and AWA2 to video localization, cross-domain transfer, and embodied tasks, often testing both unseen-class performance and retention of seen classes. A central tension is that broad transfer can be fragile: models may favor familiar classes, react strongly to prompt wording, or fail under distribution shift, while adaptation can improve results but weaken the claim of learning without target-specific training.

Latest papers

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184 papers17 papers in the last four weeks, up 55% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. SCALE: Semantic- and Confidence-Aware Conditional Variational Autoencoder for Zero-shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition

    Apr 2, 2026Soroush Oraki, Feng Ding, Jie LiangSkeleton-Based Action RecognitionZero-Shot Action Recognition

    School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada · School of Information Science and Technology, Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, China

  2. VLAgeBench: Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models for Zero-Shot Human Age Estimation

    Mar 27, 2026Rakib Hossain Sajib, Md Kishor Morol, Rajan Das Gupta +2Large Vision-Language ModelsVLM Evaluation

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Begum Rokeya University, Rangpur, Rangpur, Bangladesh · EliteLab.AI, Queens, New York, United States · Department of Computer Science, American International University - Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh

  3. Incentivizing Generative Zero-Shot Learning via Outcome-Reward Reinforcement Learning with Visual Cues

    Mar 22, 2026Wenjin Hou, Xiaoxiao Sun, Hehe FanZero-Shot LearningZero-Shot Image Classification

    CCAI, Zhejiang University · Stanford University · State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University

  4. REST: Receding Horizon Explorative Steiner Tree for Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation

    Mar 19, 2026Shuqi Xiao, Maani Ghaffari, Chengzhong Xu +1Zero-Shot LearningLarge Language Model-Based Robot Planning

    State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (SKL-IOTSC), University of Macau · Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, and Department of Robotics, University of Michigan

  5. Mutually Causal Semantic Distillation Network for Zero-Shot Learning

    Mar 18, 2026Shiming Chen, Shuhuang Chen, Guo-Sen Xie +1Zero-Shot LearningCross-Modal Representation Learning

    Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China · National Anti-Counterfeit Engineering Research Center, Wuhan, Chna · Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

  6. FlowComposer: Composable Flows for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

    Mar 17, 2026Zhenqi He, Lin Li, Long ChenZero-Shot LearningCompositional Representation Learning

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

  7. Boosting Quantitive and Spatial Awareness for Zero-Shot Object Counting

    Mar 17, 2026Da Zhang, Bingyu Li, Feiyu Wang +2Object CountingZero-Shot Learning

    Northwestern Polytechnical University · Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom · University of Science and Technology of China +1

  8. G-ZAP: A Generalizable Zero-Shot Framework for Arbitrary-Scale Pansharpening

    Mar 15, 2026Zhiqi Yang, Shan Yin, Jingze Liang +1Zero-Shot LearningRemote Sensing

    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

  9. ZTab: Domain-based Zero-shot Annotation for Table Columns

    Mar 12, 2026Ehsan Hoseinzade, Ke WangZero-Shot LearningLLM-Assisted Annotation

    School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada

  10. CarbonBench: A Global Benchmark for Upscaling of Carbon Fluxes Using Zero-Shot Learning

    Mar 10, 2026Aleksei Rozanov, Arvind Renganathan, Yimeng Zhang +1Cross-Domain GeneralizationZero-Shot Learning

    Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA

  11. Novel Semantic Prompting for Zero-Shot Action Recognition

    Mar 9, 2026Salman Iqbal, Waheed RehmanZero-Shot Action RecognitionVideo Action Recognition

  12. Beyond Heuristic Prompting: A Concept-Guided Bayesian Framework for Zero-Shot Image Recognition

    Mar 9, 2026Hui Liu, Kecheng Chen, Jialiang Wang +3Zero-Shot Image ClassificationZero-Shot Learning

    City University of Hong Kong · Harbin Institute of Technology · Nanyang Technological University

  13. Learning Adaptive and Visually Aligned Conditions for Generative Zero-Shot Learning

    Mar 6, 2026Haojie Pu, Zhuoming Li, Yongbiao Gao +3Zero-Shot LearningVision-Language Alignment

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

  14. CLIP-driven Zero-shot Learning with Ambiguous Labels

    Mar 5, 2026Jinfu Fan, Jiangnan Li, Xiaowen Yan +3Zero-Shot LearningZero-Shot Image Classification

    College of Computer Science and Technology, Qingdao University · Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education, Shandong Computer Science Center, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences) · School of Computer Science, Shanghai JiaoTong University

  15. Enhancing Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning by Integrating Visual Knowledge via Machine Imagination

    Mar 5, 2026Hyuntae Park, Yeachan Kim, SangKeun LeeLLM ReasoningZero-Shot Learning

    Department of Artificial Intelligence, Korea University, 145 Anam-ro, Seungbuk-gu, Seoul, 02841, Republic of Korea · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University, 145 Anam-ro, Seungbuk-gu, Seoul, 02841, Republic of Korea

  16. Structure-aware Prompt Adaptation from Seen to Unseen for Open-Vocabulary Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

    Mar 4, 2026Yihang Duan, Jiong Wang, Pengpeng Zeng +5Zero-Shot LearningPrompt Learning

    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Ningbo University · Southwest Jiaotong University +1

  17. Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Adaptive Subgraph Denoising for Zero-Shot Graph Learning with Large Language Models

    Mar 3, 2026Fengzhi Li, Liang Zhang, Yuan Zuo +5LLM Reasoning with GraphsZero-Shot Learning

    JIUTIAN Research, Beijing, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China · MIIT Key Laboratory of Data and Decision Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing, China +1

  18. Learning to Generate and Extract: A Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework For Zero-shot Document-level Event Arguments Extraction

    Mar 3, 2026Guangjun Zhang, Hu Zhang, Yazhou Han +4Document Information ExtractionZero-Shot Learning

    School of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China · Key Laboratory of Computational Intelligence and Chinese Information Processing of Ministry of Education, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China

  19. Evaluating Zero-Shot and One-Shot Adaptation of Small Language Models in Leader-Follower Interaction

    Feb 26, 2026Rafael R. Baptista, André de Lima Salgado, Ricardo V. Godoy +3Small Language ModelsClassification

    University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. · Federal University of Lavras, Brazil. · Faculdade Israelita de Ensino e Pesquisa Albert Einstein, Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, Brazil.

  20. WARM-CAT: Warm-Started Test-Time Comprehensive Knowledge Accumulation for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

    Feb 26, 2026Xudong Yan, Songhe Feng, Jiaxin Wang +2Zero-Shot LearningTest-Time Adaptation

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China

  21. Exploring Vision-Language Models for Open-Vocabulary Zero-Shot Action Segmentation

    Feb 24, 2026Asim Unmesh, Kaki Ramesh, Mayank Patel +2Temporal Action SegmentationZero-Shot Learning

    Purdue University, USA · Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Hyderabad, India

  22. Active perception and disentangled representations allow continual, episodic zero and few-shot learning

    Feb 22, 2026David Rawlinson, Gideon KowadloContinual LearningFew-Shot Learning

    Cerenaut AI Melbourne Australia

  23. MultiVer: Zero-Shot Multi-Agent Vulnerability Detection

    Feb 19, 2026Shreshth RajanSoftware Vulnerability DetectionLLMs for Cybersecurity

    Harvard College, Cambridge, MA, USA

  24. Let's Split Up: Zero-Shot Classifier Edits for Fine-Grained Video Understanding

    Feb 18, 2026Kaiting Liu, Hazel DoughtyZero-Shot Learning

    Leiden University

  25. Emergent Morphing Attack Detection in Open Multi-modal Large Language Models

    Feb 17, 2026Marija Ivanovska, Vitomir ŠtrucImage Forgery DetectionFace Presentation Attack Detection

    Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Tržaška cesta 25, Ljubljana, 1000, Slovenia

  26. Zero-shot HOI Detection with MLLM-based Detector-agnostic Interaction Recognition

    Feb 16, 2026Shiyu Xuan, Dongkai Wang, Zechao Li +1Human-Object InteractionZero-Shot Learning

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology · School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics · Nanjing Forestry University

  27. The Lexical Imprint of Pre-training Data

    Feb 11, 2026Jeonghoon Kim, Woojin Chung, Woomin Song +3Language Model PretrainingLanguage Model Performance Prediction

    NAVER Cloud · Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

  28. Why Can't I Open My Drawer? Mitigating Object-Driven Shortcuts in Zero-Shot Compositional Action Recognition

    Jan 22, 2026Geo Ahn, Inwoong Lee, Taeoh Kim +3Zero-Shot LearningVideo Action Recognition

    1Kyung Hee University · ∗This work was done during an internship at NAVER Cloud. · 2NAVER Cloud

  29. Unlocking Zero-shot Potential of Semi-dense Image Matching via Gaussian Splatting

    Nov 26, 2025Juncheng Chen, Chao Xu, Yanjun Cao3D Gaussian SplattingZero-Shot Learning

    State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Institute of Cyber Systems and Control, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. · Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University, Huzhou, China.

  30. RefAM: Attention Magnets for Zero-Shot Referral Segmentation

    Sep 26, 2025Anna Kukleva, Enis Simsar, Alessio Tonioni +4Attention MechanismsImage Segmentation

    Max Planck Institute for Informatics, SIC · ETH Zürich · Google +1