Adversarial Pre-training Effects on XLM-R Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer in XTREME-R

Pre-trained multilingual language encoders, such as multilingual BERT and XLM-R, show great potential for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. However, these multilingual encoders do not precisely align words and phrases across languages. Especially, learning alignments in the multilingual embedding space usually requires sentence-level or word-level parallel corpora, which are expensive to be obtained for low-resource languages. An alternative is to make the multilingual encoders more robust; when fine-tuning the encoder using downstream task, we train the encoder to tolerate noise in the contex

Research goal: How does adversarial training during pre-training affect the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance (measured in F1 score or accuracy) of XLM-R on high-resource languages in XTREME-R compared to standard pre-training methods?

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