Impact of Multilingual Synthetic Intermediate-Task Training on XLM-R Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Throughput

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 intermediate-task training with synthetic, multilingual data (e.g., translated or back-translated tasks) compare to English-only intermediate tasks in improving XLM-R's zero-shot cross-lingual transfer throughput on XTREME without accuracy trade-offs?

Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.5/10.