Multilingual Intermediate-Task Training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Reasoning Performance-Size Trade-Offs

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 combining English intermediate-task training with multilingual intermediate-task data influence the trade-off between zero-shot cross-lingual reasoning performance and model size (e.g., 110M vs. 3B parameters) on XTREME-R benchmarks?

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