Zero-Shot Prompting

Also known as: zero-shot

Zero-shot prompting asks a language model to perform a task from a plain instruction alone, without any worked examples in the prompt. It relies entirely on knowledge and capabilities acquired during pretraining and instruction tuning. Zero-shot prompts are preferred when examples are hard to curate, context is scarce, or the task is straightforward enough that the model's general competency is sufficient without additional demonstration.