Hybrid Intermediate-Task Training Efficiency in mT5-3B for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Understanding

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 efficiency trade-off (inference latency vs. accuracy) when using hybrid intermediate-task training versus direct fine-tuning on mT5-3B for zero-shot cross-lingual understanding, as evaluated on XTREME-R's adversarial subsets?

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