**Cross-lingual Performance Enhancement via Multi-task Intermediate Training in XTREME**

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: How do different combinations of intermediate tasks (e.g., entailment + coreference + QA) affect zero-shot cross-lingual performance on XTREME compared to single-task training, measured by accuracy improvements on low-resource languages in the benchmark?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.3/10.