Cross-lingual Reasoning Transfer in Multilingual Models via Intermediate English Task Training

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 English intermediate-task training on reasoning-focused benchmarks (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) improve zero-shot cross-lingual performance in multilingual models like mT5 or XLM-RoBERTa when evaluated on non-English reasoning tasks?

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