Does combining instruction-tuning with intermediate-task training (e.g., FLAN-XLMR) further 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 combining instruction-tuning with intermediate-task training (e.g., FLAN-XLMR) further improve zero-shot cross-lingual transfer accuracy on XTREME-R compared to intermediate-task training alone, measured by mUEM and mXNLI scores?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.5/10.