⭐ GLiClass: Generalist and Lightweight Model for Sequence Classification

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 and licensed data that allow commercial use and can be used in commercial applications.

The backbone model is mdeberta-v3-base. It supports multilingual understanding, making it well-suited for tasks involving texts in different languages.

How to use:

First of all, you need to install GLiClass library:

pip install gliclass
pip install -U transformers>=4.48.0

Than you need to initialize a model and a pipeline:

English

from gliclass import GLiClassModel, ZeroShotClassificationPipeline
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

model = GLiClassModel.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-x-base")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-x-base", add_prefix_space=True)
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"])

Spanish

from gliclass import GLiClassModel, ZeroShotClassificationPipeline
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

model = GLiClassModel.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-x-base")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-x-base", add_prefix_space=True)
pipeline = ZeroShotClassificationPipeline(model, tokenizer, classification_type='multi-label', device='cuda:0')

text = "¡Un día veré el mundo!"
labels = ["viajes", "sueños", "deportes", "ciencia", "política"]
results = pipeline(text, labels, threshold=0.5)[0]
for result in results:
    print(result["label"], "=>", result["score"])

Italitan

from gliclass import GLiClassModel, ZeroShotClassificationPipeline
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

model = GLiClassModel.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-x-base")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-x-base", add_prefix_space=True)
pipeline = ZeroShotClassificationPipeline(model, tokenizer, classification_type='multi-label', device='cuda:0')

text = "Un giorno vedrò il mondo!"
labels = ["viaggi", "sogni", "sport", "scienza", "politica"]
results = pipeline(text, labels, threshold=0.5)[0]
for result in results:
    print(result["label"], "=>", result["score"])

French

from gliclass import GLiClassModel, ZeroShotClassificationPipeline
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

model = GLiClassModel.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-x-base")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-x-base", add_prefix_space=True)
pipeline = ZeroShotClassificationPipeline(model, tokenizer, classification_type='multi-label', device='cuda:0')

text = "Un jour, je verrai le monde!"
labels = ["voyage", "rêves", "sport", "science", "politique"]
results = pipeline(text, labels, threshold=0.5)[0]
for result in results:
    print(result["label"], "=>", result["score"])

German

from gliclass import GLiClassModel, ZeroShotClassificationPipeline
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

model = GLiClassModel.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-x-base")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("knowledgator/gliclass-x-base", add_prefix_space=True)
pipeline = ZeroShotClassificationPipeline(model, tokenizer, classification_type='multi-label', device='cuda:0')

text = "Eines Tages werde ich die Welt sehen!"
labels = ["Reisen", "Träume", "Sport", "Wissenschaft", "Politik"]
results = pipeline(text, labels, threshold=0.5)[0]
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.

Multilingual benchmarks

General benchmarks

Citation

@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}, 
}