# Liberating Seen Classes: Boosting Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Text Classification via Anchor Generation and Classification Reframing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.03565 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03565/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [Ups and Downs: Modeling the Visual Evolution of Fashion Trends with One-Class Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01585/) (2016)
- [An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02027/) (2019)
- [Snips Voice Platform: an embedded Spoken Language Understanding system for private-by-design voice interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10190/) (2018)
- [Learning to Propagate Labels: Transductive Propagation Network for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10002/) (2018)
- [ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07922/) (2022)
- [Generating Datasets with Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07540/) (2021)
- [Entailment as Few-Shot Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14690/) (2021)
- [Learning to Write with Cooperative Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06087/) (2018)
- [Induction Networks for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10482/) (2019)
- [Zero-shot User Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00385/) (2018)
- [Meta-Learning Adversarial Domain Adaptation Network for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12262/) (2021)
- [Learning Class-Transductive Intent Representations for Zero-shot Intent Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01721/) (2020)
- [Boosting Few-Shot Text Classification via Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16764/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [GORAG: Graph-based Online Retrieval Augmented Generation for Dynamic Few-shot Social Media Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02844/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Bundling with Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Inference on Text-Attributed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17599/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Multicultural Name Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04149/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot and zero-shot text classification aim to recognize samples from novel classes with limited labeled samples or no labeled samples at all. While prevailing methods have shown promising performance via transferring knowledge from seen classes to unseen classes, they are still limited by (1) Inherent dissimilarities among classes make the transformation of features learned from seen classes to unseen classes both difficult and inefficient. (2) Rare labeled novel samples usually cannot provide enough supervision signals to enable the model to adjust from the source distribution to the target distribution, especially for complicated scenarios. To alleviate the above issues, we propose a simple and effective strategy for few-shot and zero-shot text classification. We aim to liberate the model from the confines of seen classes, thereby enabling it to predict unseen categories without the necessity of training on seen classes. Specifically, for mining more related unseen category knowledge, we utilize a large pre-trained language model to generate pseudo novel samples, and select the most representative ones as category anchors. After that, we convert the multi-class classification task into a binary classification task and use the similarities of query-anchor pairs for prediction to fully leverage the limited supervision signals. Extensive experiments on six widely used public datasets show that our proposed method can outperform other strong baselines significantly in few-shot and zero-shot tasks, even without using any seen class samples.