Fine-tuning Efficiency and Cross-lingual Performance Trade-offs in Multilingual Models

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 inference efficiency (tokens/sec) of models fine-tuned on English intermediate tasks compare to those fine-tuned on multilingual intermediate tasks when evaluated on XTREME-R, and what is the trade-off between efficiency and zero-shot cross-lingual performance?

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