GliZNet (Generalized Zero-Shot Network) is a zero-shot text classification model that processes the input text and all candidate labels jointly in a single forward pass, achieving O(1) inference complexity regardless of the number of labels.

Available in two backbone variants:

alexneakameni/gliznet-deberta-v3-base — DeBERTa-v3-base backbone (~184M params)
alexneakameni/gliznet-ModernBERT-base — ModernBERT-base backbone (~150M params)

GliZNet encodes text and labels together in one sequence, extracts each label's representation from its [LAB] separator token, builds a label-specific text summary via cross-attention, and scores each pair with a bilinear head. A hybrid loss combining one-vs-negatives softmax (primary, with additive margin), auxiliary focal loss, and a partial VICReg regularizer (variance + covariance terms only — the invariance term is dropped, leaving a pure label-repulsion objective) sharpens discrimination between semantically similar labels.

Paper: GliZNet: A Novel Architecture for Zero-Shot Text Classification Alex Kameni (Ivalua / Massy, France)

Code: github.com/KameniAlexNea/zero-shot-classification Synthetic data generation: github.com/KameniAlexNea/generate-gliznet-data

Model Details

Property	Value
Backbone	`microsoft/deberta-v3-base` (~184M) or `answerdotai/ModernBERT-base` (~150M)
Scoring head	Bilinear (`nn.Bilinear(D, D, 1)`)
Max sequence length	512 tokens
Label separator token	`[LAB]`
Label representation	`[LAB]` token hidden state
Training precision	`bfloat16`
Model type ID	`gliznet`

Architecture Summary

mermaid

flowchart TD
    A["Input sequence\n[CLS] <text> [SEP] <label_1> [LAB] <label_2> [LAB] … [PAD]"]
    A --> B["DeBERTa-v3-base\nContextual hidden states"]
    B --> C["Label repr\n[LAB] token hidden state per label"]
    B --> D["Label-specific text repr\nCross-attention: label queries text tokens"]
    C --> E["Bilinear scoring head\nlogit = Bilinear(text_repr, label_repr)"]
    D --> E
    E --> F["One-vs-negatives loss (+ margin)\n+ focal loss\n+ label repulsion\n(training only)"]

Usage

With `ZeroShotClassificationPipeline`

python

import torch
from gliznet.model import GliZNetForSequenceClassification
from gliznet.tokenizer import GliZNETTokenizer
from gliznet.predictor import ZeroShotClassificationPipeline

model = GliZNetForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained("alexneakameni/gliznet-deberta-v3-base")
model = model.to(torch.bfloat16)
tokenizer = GliZNETTokenizer.from_pretrained("alexneakameni/gliznet-deberta-v3-base")

pipeline = ZeroShotClassificationPipeline(
    model, tokenizer,
    classification_type="multi-label",   # or "multi-class"
    device="cuda",
)

text = "Scientists discover a new exoplanet orbiting a distant star."
labels = ["astronomy", "politics", "cooking", "space exploration", "finance"]

result = pipeline(text, labels)
for ls in sorted(result.labels, key=lambda x: -x.score):
    print(f"  {ls.label:<25} {ls.score:.3f}")

With `from_pretrained` + HuggingFace AutoModel

python

from transformers import AutoModel, AutoConfig
import gliznet  # triggers Auto* registration

config = AutoConfig.from_pretrained("alexneakameni/gliznet-deberta-v3-base")
model  = AutoModel.from_pretrained("alexneakameni/gliznet-deberta-v3-base")

Performance

Evaluated on the GLiClass benchmark — 10 standard text-classification datasets reported as macro F1. GLiClass variants are the closest published competitors; all encode text and labels jointly in a single forward pass.

Macro F1 on GLiClass benchmark datasets

Dataset	GliZNet ModernBERT-Base (ours)	GliZNet DeBERTa-v3-Base (ours)	GLiClass-large-v3	GLiClass-base-v3	GLiClass-modern-base
CR	0.8902	0.9001	0.9281	0.9127	0.8936
SST-2	0.8710	0.8858	0.9176	0.8959	0.8982
SST-5	0.4227	0.3387	0.3798	0.3236	0.2885
IMDb	0.8866	0.9037	0.9366	0.9248	0.9154
20-Newsgroups	0.3981	0.4862	0.5806	0.5045	0.3342
Enron Spam	0.4317	0.5892	0.7574	0.6252	0.5903
Financial PhraseBank	0.8037	0.7970	0.9023	0.9094	0.4121
AG News	0.7800	0.7384	0.7229	0.7209	0.7069
Emotion	0.4042	0.5135	0.4504	0.4450	0.4249
Rotten Tomatoes	0.7456	0.7357	0.8411	0.7943	0.7060
AVERAGE	0.6634	0.6888	0.7417	0.7056	0.6170

Δ GliZNet-ModernBERT vs GLiClass-large: −0.0783 · Δ vs GLiClass-base: −0.0422 · Δ vs GLiClass-modern-base: +0.0464 Δ GliZNet-DeBERTa vs GLiClass-large: −0.0529 · Δ vs GLiClass-base: −0.0168 · Δ vs GLiClass-modern-base: +0.0718

Both GliZNet variants are base-size models trained on synthetic data with a single-stage pipeline. GliZNet-DeBERTa surpasses GLiClass-base on AG News, Emotion, and SST-5. GliZNet-ModernBERT excels on SST-5 (+0.0991 vs GLiClass-base) and AG News (+0.0591).

Training Details

Setting	Value
Dataset	`alexneakameni/ZSHOT-HARDSET-v2` (train split) + `alexneakameni/eval-zero-shot-classification` (test)
Additional datasets	14 MCQ / NLI datasets (1k samples each)
Optimizer	AdamW
Learning rate	1e-5 (cosine schedule, 5% warmup)
Weight decay	1e-3
Batch size	48 × 2 GPUs × 2 grad. accum. = 192 effective
Epochs	10 (early stopping, patience=3)
Precision	bf16
Distributed training	DDP via `accelerate launch`
Hardware	2 × NVIDIA GPU
Loss	One-vs-negatives softmax (weight 0.8, margin 0.25) + focal loss (weight 1.2, γ=1.85, adaptive γ=0 for pure-class samples, class-balanced averaging) + label repulsion (weight 0.4) + alignment loss (weight 0.2, cosine embedding loss with margin=0.2, asymmetric weighting)
Max labels per sample	20
Label enrichment	`LabelContextAttention`: each label attends to peers + their first-pass text evidence (cooperative routing)
Text augmentation	nlpaug pipeline (keyboard typos, OCR typos, char swap/delete, word delete, spelling errors, suffix truncation, case change)
Label augmentation	`ScenarioAwareSampler`: needle 20%, few_pos 15%, few_neg 10%, balanced 10%, passthrough 45%. Count sampled via triangular distribution biased toward max.

Tokenizer

GliZNETTokenizer wraps the DeBERTa-v3 sentencepiece tokenizer and adds a custom [LAB] separator token. The input format is:

[CLS] <text> [SEP] <label_1> [LAB] <label_2> [LAB] ... <label_n> [LAB] [PAD]*

The lmask tensor (label mask) assigns 0 to text tokens and unique integers 1…n to each label's tokens, allowing the model to pool each label independently.

Limitations

Trained on synthetic English data; performance on specialized domains (legal, medical) or non-English text may degrade.
Best results when all candidate labels fit within 1024 tokens. Very large label sets should be batched.
The model does not produce calibrated probabilities; scores are bilinear compatibility values passed through a sigmoid.

Citation

bibtex

@article{kameni2025gliznet,
  title   = {GliZNet: A Novel Architecture for Zero-Shot Text Classification},
  author  = {Alex Kameni},
  year    = {2025},
  note    = {Preprint. Code: https://github.com/KameniAlexNea/zero-shot-classification}
}

License

Apache 2.0

alexneakameni/gliznet-deberta-v3-base

GliZNet