# SAS: Self-Augmentation Strategy for Language Model Pre-training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.07176 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07176/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [Fine-Tuning Pretrained Language Models: Weight Initializations, Data Orders, and Early Stopping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06305/) (2020)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09223/) (2019)
- [On the Stability of Fine-tuning BERT: Misconceptions, Explanations, and Strong Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04884/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Few-sample BERT Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05987/) (2020)
- [CLEAR: Contrastive Learning for Sentence Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15466/) (2020)
- [COCO-LM: Correcting and Contrasting Text Sequences for Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08473/) (2021)
- [StructBERT: Incorporating Language Structures into Pre-training for Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04577/) (2019)
- [Pre-Training Transformers as Energy-Based Cloze Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08561/) (2020)
- [Self-Paced Learning for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04505/) (2020)
- [MC-BERT: Efficient Language Pre-Training via a Meta Controller](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05744/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [From Chatter to Matter: Addressing Critical Steps of Emotion Recognition Learning in Task-oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12648/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The core of self-supervised learning for pre-training language models includes pre-training task design as well as appropriate data augmentation. Most data augmentations in language model pre-training are context-independent. A seminal contextualized augmentation was recently proposed in ELECTRA and achieved state-of-the-art performance by introducing an auxiliary generation network (generator) to produce contextualized data augmentation for the training of a main discrimination network (discriminator). This design, however, introduces extra computation cost of the generator and a need to adjust the relative capability between the generator and the discriminator. In this paper, we propose a self-augmentation strategy (SAS) where a single network is utilized for both regular pre-training and contextualized data augmentation for the training in later epochs. Essentially, this strategy eliminates a separate generator and uses the single network to jointly conduct two pre-training tasks with MLM (Masked Language Modeling) and RTD (Replaced Token Detection) heads. It avoids the challenge to search for an appropriate size of the generator, which is critical to the performance as evidenced in ELECTRA and its subsequent variant models. In addition, SAS is a general strategy that can be seamlessly combined with many new techniques emerging recently or in the future, such as the disentangled attention mechanism from DeBERTa. Our experiments show that SAS is able to outperform ELECTRA and other state-of-the-art models in the GLUE tasks with similar or less computation cost.