Performance Comparison of English vs. Multilingual Intermediate-Task Training in Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer on XTREME-R

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 does the performance gain from English intermediate-task training in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer compare to training with multilingual intermediate tasks (e.g., XCOPA, mXSUM) on XTREME-R when using Bloom or mBART, measured by average accuracy across typologically diverse languages?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.9/10.