# SAT: Improving Semi-Supervised Text Classification with Simple Instance-Adaptive Self-Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12653 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12653/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [Improving Neural Machine Translation Models with Monolingual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06709/) (2015)
- [FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08263/) (2021)
- [MixText: Linguistically-Informed Interpolation of Hidden Space for Semi-Supervised Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12239/) (2020)
- [Good-Enough Compositional Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09545/) (2019)
- [Population Based Augmentation: Efficient Learning of Augmentation Policy Schedules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05393/) (2019)
- [AdaMatch: A Unified Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning and Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04732/) (2021)
- [Edinburgh Neural Machine Translation Systems for WMT 16](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02891/) (2016)
- [Few-Shot Text Classification with Triplet Networks, Data Augmentation, and Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07552/) (2021)
- [DoubleMix: Simple Interpolation-Based Data Augmentation for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05297/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [JointMatch: A Unified Approach for Diverse and Collaborative Pseudo-Labeling to Semi-Supervised Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14583/) (2023)
- [DeCrisisMB: Debiased Semi-Supervised Learning for Crisis Tweet Classification via Memory Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14577/) (2023)
- [MultiMatch: Multihead Consistency Regularization Matching for Semi-Supervised Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07801/) (2025)
- [Self-Training for Sample-Efficient Active Learning for Text Classification with Pre-Trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09206/) (2024)
- [TCProF: Time-Complexity Prediction SSL Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15749/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-training methods have been explored in recent years and have exhibited great performance in improving semi-supervised learning. This work presents a Simple instance-Adaptive self-Training method (SAT) for semi-supervised text classification. SAT first generates two augmented views for each unlabeled data and then trains a meta-learner to automatically identify the relative strength of augmentations based on the similarity between the original view and the augmented views. The weakly-augmented view is fed to the model to produce a pseudo-label and the strongly-augmented view is used to train the model to predict the same pseudo-label. We conducted extensive experiments and analyses on three text classification datasets and found that with varying sizes of labeled training data, SAT consistently shows competitive performance compared to existing semi-supervised learning methods. Our code can be found at urlhttps://github.com/declare-lab/SAT.git.