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Zero Shot

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This chapter was written from the product's source code and has not yet been checked by a person on a running Cogneris. If what you see on screen differs, the screen is right — please tell your Cogneris contact so the chapter can be corrected.

Zero Shot reads documents for which you have no prepared template. For each document, the Cogneris Vision service decides on its own what type of document it is and what it contains.

PaletteNodes › Zero Shot
OutputsOne output.
Content statusFrom source; not observed (workflow-fe f88c5c1, workflow-be 6703373, 2026-10-22)

When to use it​

  • For documents that no template of your company covers — for example a type you receive too rarely to model.
  • After a Conditional that catches documents Extraction could not identify (with its Detect document type option on), so that only those go through Zero Shot.

When the documents have templates, prefer Classification followed by Extraction: the fields then have the names your templates declare.

What happens in a run​

The phase reads the documents from the output of the phase that leads into it, and handles them one at a time:

  1. A document that already failed in an earlier phase is not processed again; it is carried forward as skipped.
  2. The document is sent to the Vision service without any template.
  3. The answer — the document type, the confidence and the content the model read — is recorded on the document of the run, and the type is stamped on it, so a later Manual Review can file the document under that type.

The output is one row per document (document, zeroShot, and skipped or error when they apply) plus the list of documents, unchanged. A later phase or condition reads the type at results[N].zeroShot.documentType, where N is the document's position starting at 0.

Zero Shot never resolves a template. An Extraction placed after it copies its result forward but still lets the AI name the fields.

In the phase detail of a run, Zero Shot shows the type found for each document. The content the model read is not shown there, because it is free-form and may hold personal data.

When documents fail​

A failure on one document marks only that document failed; the others carry on, and later phases skip it.

  • A temporary failure of the Vision service (server error, timeout, connection error, too many requests) is retried up to 3 times for that document. When the service asks to wait at most 10 seconds, the phase waits that long.
  • If no document succeeded:
    • and a Manual Review is still ahead in the process, the phase completes anyway and the review receives the failed documents for a person to decide;
    • otherwise, if every failure was temporary, the whole phase runs again, up to 3 more times;
    • otherwise the documents are marked failed and the process fails. If exactly one Send is still ahead, it runs first to deliver the failure, every other pending phase is skipped, and the process then ends as failed.
  • If at least one document succeeded, a document whose temporary failure outlasted its retries is marked failed; the phase is not run again for it.

Configuration​

Select the node to open Phase Configuration. Its header shows the phase name, Zero Shot. The phase has nothing to configure beyond its Description: the panel says This phase has nothing to configure.

FieldWhat it doesRequiredFormat / valuesDefaultValidation messages
DescriptionThe name shown on the node.NoFree text. Left empty, the node keeps its previous name.Zero Shot—

Common problems​

MessageCauseWhat to do
Auth token missing for run; cannot call the document service. (service text, run error)The process carries no credential for the Vision service.Start the process again. If it persists, contact Cogneris support.
No documents found for zero-shot. (service text, run error)The phase received no documents.Check that the phase leading into Zero Shot passes documents on.
zero_shot: no document succeeded — … (service text, run error)Every document failed. The text lists the error of each one.Read each document's error, check the files, then start the process again.
zero_shot: no document succeeded because all failures were transient — … (service text)Every document hit a temporary failure. The phase is run again automatically.Wait. If the process then fails, start it again later.
Field names differ from one process to the nextZero Shot uses no template, so the AI names the fields.If the document type recurs, create a template for it and use Classification and Extraction.

Last reviewed 2026-10-22 · Version 1.0.0 · Owner: product-documentation