Papers › ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation
ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation
Jiacheng Ye, Jiahui Gao, Qintong Li, Hang Xu, Jiangtao Feng, Zhiyong Wu, Tao Yu, Lingpeng Kong
There is a growing interest in dataset generation recently due to the superior generative capacity of large pre-trained language models (PLMs). In this paper, we study a flexible and efficient zero-short learning method, \textsc{ZeroGen}. Given a zero-shot task, we first generate a dataset from scratch using PLMs in an unsupervised manner. Then, we train a tiny task model (e.g., LSTM) under the supervision of the synthesized dataset. This approach allows highly efficient inference as the final task model only has orders of magnitude fewer parameters comparing to PLMs (e.g., GPT2-XL). Apart from being annotation-free and efficient, we argue that \textsc{ZeroGen} can also provide useful insights from the perspective of data-free model-agnostic knowledge distillation, and unreferenced text generation evaluation. Experiments and analysis on different NLP tasks, namely, text classification, question answering, and natural language inference, show the effectiveness of \textsc{ZeroGen}.
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Code
Syntology Ran 3 of 7 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 4 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 2 ran · our draft was wrong; 1 ran with no contract checked.
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
7 samples harvested; 3 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 4 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data-free Knowledge Distillation | QNLI | ZeroGen (T5-base) | Accuracy | 88.5 | #2 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Data-free Knowledge Distillation | SQuAD | ZeroGen (T5-base) | Exact Match | 69.4 | #3 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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