Effectiveness of Intermediate-Task Training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Across Model Sizes

Intermediate-task training---fine-tuning a pretrained model on an intermediate task before fine-tuning again on the target task---often improves model performance substantially on language understanding tasks in monolingual English settings. We investigate whether English intermediate-task training is still helpful on non-English target tasks. Using nine intermediate language-understanding tasks, we evaluate intermediate-task transfer in a zero-shot cross-lingual setting on the XTREME benchmark. We see large improvements from intermediate training on the BUCC and Tatoeba sentence retrieval tas

Research goal: Does the effectiveness of English intermediate-task training for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer scale with model size, as measured by accuracy improvements on XTREME across different model sizes (e.g., base vs. large vs. XL)?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.0/10.