Impact of Multilingual Model Scaling on English Intermediate-Task Training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual XTREME-R Performance

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 scaling the model size of multilingual models (e.g., mT5, XLM-R) improve the efficacy of English intermediate-task training for zero-shot cross-lingual performance on XTREME-R compared to smaller models, measured by average accuracy across languages?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.8/10.