Model Size Scaling and Intermediate-Task Training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Generalization

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: What is the impact of model size scaling (e.g., 1B vs. 10B parameters) on the effectiveness of English intermediate-task training for zero-shot cross-lingual generalization, as measured by average accuracy across XTREME-R subsets?

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