Combining Multilingual and English-Only Intermediate Task Training for 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 combining multilingual intermediate task training (using 5+ high-resource non-English languages) with English-only intermediate task training further improve few-shot cross-lingual performance on XTREME-R compared to either method alone, as measured by average accuracy across all tasks?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.2/10.