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Self-supervised learning

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Learning by predicting parts of the input itself, such as the next token, over large corpora; the AI Act's definition of a general-purpose model names self-supervision at scale 1. Corpus provenance, rights and memorisation are hard to trace, which is why the AIBOM records dataset provenance.

Developed in
ch. 11, By learning paradigm
Chapters
ch. 11, AI Defined
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

The term is not used under this name in running prose; the sections listed under "Developed in" treat it.

  • Machine learning

    The branch of AI in which a system improves at a task by learning patterns from data rather than by following rules people wrote.

  • Reinforcement learning

    Learning to maximise a reward signal through trial and feedback.

  • Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)

    A way to align a pre-trained model: supervised fine-tuning on human demonstrations, then reinforcement learning against a reward model trained on human…

  • Reward hacking

    A system finding an unintended way to maximise its reward or objective without doing what its designers meant.

  • Supervised learning

    Learning from labelled examples.

  • Unsupervised learning

    Learning structure (clusters, anomalies) from data without labels.

  • AI Act (EU)

    Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the EU's horizontal, risk-tiered law for AI, amended by the Digital Omnibus.

  • AIBOM

    AI bill of materials: the machine-readable inventory of an AI system's components (models, datasets, dependencies) in formats such as CycloneDX ML-BOM or the…

Sources

  1. [1] Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (AI Act), consolidated text as amended by Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 (Digital Omnibus on AI, in force 27 Jul 2026; definitions in Art. 3, incl. 3(1), 3(3) to 3(14), 3(14b), 3(20), 3(22), 3(23), 3(29) to 3(32), 3(49), 3(55) to 3(57), 3(60), 3(61), 3(63), 3(68); Arts. 4, 5, 6 (incl. 6(3) third subparagraph, profiling), 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 22 to 27 (incl. 26(11)), 40, 41, 43, 47, 48, 50, 53 (incl. 53(1)(c)), 55, 57, 60, 72, 73, 86; Annexes I, III, IV). Publications Office of the EU (EUR-Lex). 2026-07-27. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/2026-07-27/eng (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Self-supervised learning. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/self-supervised-learning. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026selfsupervisedlearning,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Self-supervised learning}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/self-supervised-learning}
}