This is an efficient zero-shot classifier inspired by GLiNER work. It demonstrates the same performance as a cross-encoder while being more compute-efficient because classification is done at a single forward path.

It can be used for topic classification, sentiment analysis and as a reranker in RAG pipelines.

The model was trained on synthetic data and can be used in commercial applications.

This model wasn't additionally fine-tuned on any dataset except initial (MoritzLaurer/synthetic_zeroshot_mixtral_v0.1).

How to use:

First of all, you need to install GLiClass library:

pip install gliclass

Than you need to initialize a model and a pipeline:

python

from gliclass import GLiClassModel, ZeroShotClassificationPipeline
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

model = GLiClassModel.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-small-v1.0-init")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-small-v1.0-init")

pipeline = ZeroShotClassificationPipeline(model, tokenizer, classification_type='multi-label', device='cuda:0')

text = "One day I will see the world!"
labels = ["travel", "dreams", "sport", "science", "politics"]
results = pipeline(text, labels, threshold=0.5)[0] #because we have one text

for result in results:
 print(result["label"], "=>", result["score"])

Benchmarks:

Below, you can see the F1 score on several text classification datasets. All tested models were not fine-tuned on those datasets and were tested in a zero-shot setting.

Model	IMDB	AG_NEWS	Emotions
gliclass-large-v1.0 (438 M)	0.9404	0.7516	0.4874
gliclass-base-v1.0 (186 M)	0.8650	0.6837	0.4749
gliclass-small-v1.0 (144 M)	0.8650	0.6805	0.4664
Bart-large-mnli (407 M)	0.89	0.6887	0.3765
Deberta-base-v3 (184 M)	0.85	0.6455	0.5095
Comprehendo (184M)	0.90	0.7982	0.5660
SetFit BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5 (33.4M)	0.86	0.5636	0.5754

Citation

bibtex

@misc{stepanov2025gliclassgeneralistlightweightmodel,
      title={GLiClass: Generalist Lightweight Model for Sequence Classification Tasks}, 
      author={Ihor Stepanov and Mykhailo Shtopko and Dmytro Vodianytskyi and Oleksandr Lukashov and Alexander Yavorskyi and Mykyta Yaroshenko},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2508.07662},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07662}, 
}