X-Shot: A Unified System to Handle Frequent, Few-shot and Zero-shot Learning Simultaneously in Classification

Hanzi Xu, Muhao Chen, Lifu Huang, Slobodan Vucetic, Wenpeng Yin


Abstract
In recent years, few-shot and zero-shot learning, which learn to predict labels with limited annotated instances, have garnered significant attention. Traditional approaches often treat frequent-shot (freq-shot; labels with abundant instances), few-shot, and zero-shot learning as distinct challenges, optimizing systems for just one of these scenarios. Yet, in real-world settings, label occurrences vary greatly. Some of them might appear thousands of times, while others might only appear sporadically or not at all. For practical deployment, it is crucial that a system can adapt to any label occurrence. We introduce a novel classification challenge: **X-shot**, reflecting a real-world context where freq-shot, few-shot, and zero-shot labels co-occur without predefined limits. Here, **X** can span from 0 to positive infinity. The crux of **X-shot** centers on open-domain generalization and devising a system versatile enough to manage various label scenarios. To solve **X-shot**, we propose **BinBin** (**B**inary **IN**ference **B**ased on **IN**struction following) that leverages the Indirect Supervision from a large collection of NLP tasks via instruction following, bolstered by Weak Supervision provided by large language models. **BinBin** surpasses previous state-of-the-art techniques on three benchmark datasets across multiple domains. To our knowledge, this is the first work addressing **X-shot** learning, where **X** remains variable.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.276
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4652–4665
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.276
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.276
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hanzi Xu, Muhao Chen, Lifu Huang, Slobodan Vucetic, and Wenpeng Yin. 2024. X-Shot: A Unified System to Handle Frequent, Few-shot and Zero-shot Learning Simultaneously in Classification. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 4652–4665, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
X-Shot: A Unified System to Handle Frequent, Few-shot and Zero-shot Learning Simultaneously in Classification (Xu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.276.pdf