Scaling Intermediate Tasks in mT5 Models for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

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: What is the effect of scaling the number of intermediate tasks (e.g., 5 vs. 10) on the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance of mT5 models, as measured by XTREME-R benchmark scores across typologically diverse languages?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.3/10.