ZSL

ZSL most often refers to the Zoological Society of London, a conservation charity established in 1826. The organization promotes the study and protection of animals and their habitats and operates two major zoos, London Zoo and Whipsnade Zoo, as well as a network of field conservation projects around the world. Beyond captive facilities, ZSL conducts scientific research in zoology and conservation biology, develops strategies for biodiversity protection, and disseminates knowledge through publications and educational programs. It is funded by donations, memberships, grants, and partnerships with governments and other institutions. The charity is governed by a board of trustees and led by a director, and it has historically held royal patronage and support from the scientific community.

ZSL also stands for zero-shot learning in the field of machine learning. In zero-shot learning, a model is required to recognize or categorize objects that were not present in the training data. This is achieved by leveraging auxiliary semantic information such as attribute descriptions, word embeddings, or knowledge graphs that relate unseen classes to seen ones. Zero-shot learning is used mainly in computer vision and natural language processing and often involves learning a shared embedding space or using generative models to synthesize training examples for unseen classes. Challenges include maintaining high accuracy across diverse domains, domain shift, and the quality of the auxiliary information. Researchers pursue zero-shot learning to enable models to generalize more broadly with limited labeled data.