There is a growing interest in dataset generation recently due to the superior generative capacity of large pre-trained language models (PLMs). In this paper, we study a flexible and efficient zero-short learning method, ZeroGen. Given a zero-shot task, we first generate a dataset from scratch using PLMs in an unsupervised manner. Then, we train a tiny task model (e.g., LSTM) under the supervision of the synthesized dataset. This approach allows highly efficient inference as the final task model only has orders of magnitude fewer parameters comparing to PLMs (e.g., GPT2-XL). Apart from being annotation-free and efficient, we argue that ZeroGen can also provide useful insights from the perspective of data-free model-agnostic knowledge distillation, and unreferenced text generation evaluation. Experiments and analysis on different NLP tasks, namely, text classification, question answering, and natural language inference), show the effectiveness of ZeroGen.

本文研究了一种灵活高效的零样本学习方法-零样本生成（ZeroGen），基于预训练语言模型（PLMs）无监督生成数据集，并使用该数据集训练小型模型进行任务处理，从而实现高效推理。实验和分析表明，	extsc{ZeroGen}在文本分类、问答和自然语言推理等NLP任务中的有效性。

ZeroGen：通过数据集生成高效的零样本学习