Does increasing the number of intermediate tasks (e.g., 9 vs. 18) in English during training improve zero-shot cross-lingual

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 increasing the number of intermediate tasks (e.g., 9 vs. 18) in English during training improve zero-shot cross-lingual performance on XTREME-R, and if so, at what efficiency cost in terms of training time per epoch?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 7.7/10.