**Cross-lingual Transfer Effectiveness in Intermediate-Task Training**

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 vary across different task types (e.g., classification, NLI, QA) in XTREME-R, and if so, which task types benefit the most in terms of F1 score improvements?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.5/10.