A Classifier That Teaches Itself: Self-Improving, Frozen-gate Training (SIFT) for Dynamic Document Classification
Authors: Bogdan Raduta, Horia Velicu, Alexandru Preda, Serban Chiricescu
Abstract
Document classification is a solved problem in the laboratory and an unsolved one in the enterprise. The blocker is rarely model architecture; it is the labeling project that must precede a model and the institutional fear of letting a model retrain itself once one exists. We present SIFT (Self-Improving, Frozen-gate Training), a dynamic classifier service, which attacks both. SIFT serves classification from a deliberately cheap, CPU-bound pipeline, a SPLADE sparse encoder feeding a LightGBM head, and escalates only the low-confidence minority of pages to an LLM judge. The judge's verdicts are written back into a labeled corpus, so the expensive model continuously teaches the cheap one: the escalation rate falls, the corpus grows from production traffic rather than from an up-front annotation effort, and accuracy compounds with use. Onboarding a new document family requires only a declarative bundle, label space, anchor phrases, and a judge glossary, not a labeling project. The harder problem is safety: an autonomously retraining classifier can silently regress. SIFT resolves this with a two-part promote gate, a critical-label F1 regression check plus a frozen golden regression set the model is never trained on, either of which vetoes promotion. This turns "retrain monthly without a human" from reckless into routine. We describe the architecture, the self-feeding corpus loop, the frozen-gate promotion mechanism, and an illustrative multi-domain deployment, and we discuss the economics of a classifier whose marginal labeling cost trends toward zero.
Organizations that scan documents for sensitive information face a practical problem. Cloud services require data to be sent to external infrastructure, while rule-based tools often miss threats that depend on context. This study presents TorchSight, an open-source local system for security document classification built around a fine-tuned Qwen 3.5 27B model. The model was trained on 78,358 samples from 13 permissively licensed sources and GPT-4 synthetic data covering seven security categories and 51 subcategories. In the main evaluation on 1,000 documents, the model reached 95.0% category-level accuracy (95% confidence interval: 93.5-96.2). The tested commercial models scored 75.4-79.9% under the same prompting protocol. On a separate external set of 500 held-out samples, the model reached 93.8% accuracy, which suggests that performance extends beyond the main benchmark, although the margin depends on dataset composition and difficult boundary cases. The results show that a fine-tuned local model can support accurate security document classification while keeping document processing under local control.
Standard supervised classification trains models to imitate the exact labels provided by a perfect oracle. This imitation happens in a single pass, restricting the model to a fixed compute budget even when inputs vary in complexity. Moreover, the rigid training objective forces the model to express absolute certainty on its training data, resulting in overconfident predictions during evaluation. We propose Reinforced Iterative Classification (RIC), which replaces the imitative objective with Reinforcement Learning (RL). RIC deploys a recurrent agent that iteratively updates a predictive distribution over classes, receiving reward for stepwise improvement in prediction quality. The value function provides a natural halting criterion by estimating the remaining scope for improvement. We prove that the iterative formulation recovers the same optimal predictions as cross-entropy while yielding an anytime classifier. On image classification benchmarks, RIC matches the accuracy of supervised baselines with improved calibration and learns to allocate computation adaptively across inputs.
Existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources often lack the task-specific information required for real-world problems and provide limited coverage of lesser-known or newly introduced entities. For example, business organizations and health care providers may need to be classified into a variety of different taxonomic schemes for specific application tasks. Our goal is to enable domain experts to easily create a task-specific classifier for entities by providing only entity names and gold labels as training data. Our framework then dynamically acquires descriptive text about each entity, which is subsequently used as the basis for producing a text-based classifier. We propose a novel text acquisition method that leverages both web and large language models (LLMs). We evaluate our proposed framework on two classification problems in distinct domains: (i) classifying organizations into Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) Codes, which categorize organizations based on their business activities; and (ii) classifying healthcare providers into healthcare provider taxonomy codes, which represent a provider's medical specialty and area of practice. Our best-performing model achieved macro-averaged F1-scores of 82.3% and 72.9% on the SIC code and healthcare taxonomy code classification tasks, respectively.