Challenge: Text and vision foundation models can perform many tasks in a zero-shot setting . however, there has been little work on the zero-shoot abilities of ASR foundation models .
Approach: They investigate the ability of ASR foundation models to perform zero-shot audio classification using text prompts and a decoding probability generator.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on audio classification datasets without training them on extra data or adding any parameters.

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Zero-Shot Context-Aware ASR for Diverse Arabic Varieties (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large-scale multilingual ASR has substantially improved recognition for high-resource languages.
Approach: They propose a proxy-guided -best selection paradigm that conditions inference on external side information without parameter updates.
Outcome: The proposed model reduces WER by 15.6% relative and recovers a fraction of oracle n-best gains on the common voice MSA testbed.
Zero-Shot Text Classification with Self-Training (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large pretrained language models have increased attention to zero-shot text classification.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play method to bridge this gap by requiring only class names along with an unlabeled dataset.
Outcome: The proposed model can be trained on a natural language inference dataset and performs on dozens of unseen tasks without the need for domain expertise or trial and error.
Label Agnostic Pre-training for Zero-shot Text Classification (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to text classification assume a fixed set of labels . however, in real-world applications, there exists an infinite label space for describing a given text .
Approach: They propose two new methods that inject aspect-level understanding into pre-trained models at train time to improve zero-shot generalization.
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Idiosyncratic Versus Normative Modeling of Atypical Speech Recognition: Dysarthric Case Studies (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Past studies have focused on fully personalized (or idiosyncratic) models for atypical speech . past studies focused on idiotic models, but current approaches focus on generalizing and handling idiomatic patterns .
Approach: They compare four models that generalize and handle idiosyncrasy to find atypical speech . they find the dysarthric-idios-ync model performs better than the idioconic approach .
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OpenSR: Open-Modality Speech Recognition via Maintaining Multi-Modality Alignment (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Speech Recognition often gets stuck in the lack of new domain utterances when training a model of new-domain speech.
Approach: They propose a training system Open-modality Speech Recognition that enables zero-shot modality transfer . they use multi-modal alignment in phoneme space to maintain multi-modality alignment .
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PAT: Parameter-Free Audio-Text Aligner to Boost Zero-Shot Audio Classification (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Audio-Language Models (ALMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in zero-shot audio classification.
Approach: They propose a training-free method that enhances audio and language representations using mutual feedback.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms vanilla zero-shot evaluation with significant margins of 0.42%-27.0%.
Navigating Prompt Complexity for Zero-Shot Classification: A Study of Large Language Models in Computational Social Science (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive language understanding and the capacity to generate responses that follow specific prompts.
Approach: They evaluate the zero-shot performance of two publicly accessible LLMs, ChatGPT and OpenAssistant, in the context of six Computational Social Science classification tasks.
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Zero-shot prompt-based classification: topic labeling in times of foundation models in German Tweets (2025.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Recent advances in NLP have enabled the use of text-to-text annotation without providing training samples.
Approach: They propose a text-to-text interface for automatic annotation using written guidelines without providing training samples.
Outcome: The proposed approach is comparable with the fine-tuned BERT but without any training data.
Enhancing Few-Shot Topic Classification with Verbalizers. a Study on Automatic Verbalizer and Ensemble Methods (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Pretrained language models are increasingly being used for many tasks.
Approach: They propose to use verbalizers to help interpret masked word distributions into output predictions.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms models trained with individual templates while using significantly less resources.
kNN Retrieval for Simple and Effective Zero-Shot Multi-speaker Text-to-Speech (2025.naacl-short)

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Challenge: Neural text-to-speech (TTS) models typically rely on extensive transcribed speech datasets and intricate training pipelines.
Approach: They propose a framework for zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech using retrieval methods which leverage the linear relationships between SSL features.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art models trained on large training datasets.

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