# Zero-Shot Visualization: Exploring Text Corpora with User-Prompted Axes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06889 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06889/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07316/) (2022)
- [Efficient Intent Detection with Dual Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04807/) (2020)
- [DVQA: Understanding Data Visualizations via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08163/) (2018)
- [Distilling a Neural Network Into a Soft Decision Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09784/) (2017)
- [DePlot: One-shot visual language reasoning by plot-to-table translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10505/) (2022)
- [Concept Induction: Analyzing Unstructured Text with High-Level Concepts Using LLooM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12259/) (2024)
- [SPLADE-v3: New baselines for SPLADE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06789/) (2024)
- [Fine-Tuned 'Small' LLMs (Still) Significantly Outperform Zero-Shot Generative AI Models in Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08660/) (2024)
- [VisEval: A Benchmark for Data Visualization in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00981/) (2024)
- [Visualization Generation with Large Language Models: An Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11255/) (2024)
- [Cycles of Thought: Measuring LLM Confidence through Stable Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03441/) (2024)
- [TikZero: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Graphics Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11509/) (2025)
- [nvAgent: Automated Data Visualization from Natural Language via Collaborative Agent Workflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05036/) (2025)
- [Small Language Models are Good Too: An Empirical Study of Zero-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11122/) (2024)
- [Generation-driven Contrastive Self-training for Zero-shot Text Classification with Instruction-following LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11872/) (2023)
- [Understanding State Preferences With Text As Data: Introducing the UN General Debate Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02774/) (2017)
- [Gen-Z: Generative Zero-Shot Text Classification with Contextualized Label Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07115/) (2023)
- [Crafting Large Language Models for Enhanced Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04307/) (2024)
- [DataLab: A Unified Platform for LLM-Powered Business Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02205/) (2024)
- [Natural Language Generation for Visualizations: State of the Art, Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19747/) (2024)
- [Vocabulary-informed Zero-shot and Open-set Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00998/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the application of large language models (LLMs) to the visual exploration of textual corpora. We introduce zero-shot visualization (ZSV), a task in which users specify concepts in natural language and documents are mapped onto the corresponding concept axes for visualization. Building a ZSV system of practical value is non-trivial, as it requires choices at the intersection of feature functions, efficient implementation tradeoffs, and pre/post-processing decisions affecting visualization quality. To that end, we establish a benchmark that compares methods spanning embedding similarity, direct semantic judgments, and conditional likelihood estimation in this setting. Across multiple datasets and use cases we evaluate the properties of different scoring methods and design choices in terms of semantic faithfulness, score fidelity, and computational cost. Our results identify that scoring based on next-token probabilities offers the strongest practical trade-off among the evaluated methods. We further apply this approach to unlabeled corpora to examine its behavior in realistic exploratory settings. These experiments highlight additional design considerations, including the use of graded axes together with binary relevance filtering, and reveal a compositional sentiment bias in off-topic documents. Based on these findings, we provide practical guidelines for constructing end-to-end ZSV baselines.