self

Definition

A prefix meaning the operation applies to the thing itself: self-supervised learning derives labels from the data instead of from annotators, self-attention relates positions within one sequence rather than across two, self-distillation uses a model as its own teacher. The common thread is removing an external source — of labels, of a second sequence, of a bigger teacher. What is reflexive differs per compound.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: Aspire — Can Models Self-Evolve from Vague Goals?Aspire: Can Models Self-Evolve from Vague Goals?
• Self-Improving AI — Self-Play, Co-Evolution, and Generated CurriculaMastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm
• Paper Walkthrough: PILOT in the Loop — Fixing the Run While It Is Still RunningPILOT in the Loop: Live Self-Improvement for Long-Horizon Agents