Label-Centric Knowledge Retrieval for Zero-Shot Text Classification

Flagship large language models (LLMs) offer rich general knowledge and strong reasoning capabilities, but their high inference cost and latency limit their use for large-scale data labeling. We study zero-shot text classification with semantically meaningful labels and task descriptions, without task-specific labeled examples or classifier feedback. We propose SLKR (Semantic Label Knowledge Retrieval), a label-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework that separates offline knowledge construction from lightweight online inference. Offline, a flagship LLM independently generates label definitions, retrieval keywords, and boundary rules for potentially confusable label pairs, forming a reusable label-knowledge store. Because this construction operates over the label space rather than the input corpus, its one-time flagship cost can be amortized across large-scale inference. Online, hybrid semantic and lexical retrieval first identifies the top-K candidate labels and then selects up to M input-relevant boundary rules connecting candidate-label pairs. A lightweight LLM performs the final classification in a single call using the retrieved definitions and rules. Across three public benchmarks and a real-world multilingual book-classification dataset, SLKR achieves the best results on all four datasets with Qwen3.5-4B and on three of four with Ministral-3-3B, while using compact input contexts and no task-specific labeled examples. Boundary ablations further show that retrieving a small set of input-relevant rules preserves performance close to using all boundaries with substantially less context, supporting efficient reuse of flagship-generated label knowledge for lightweight classification.