Robustness and Scaling of Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer via English Intermediate-Task Training in XTREME-R

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 robust are the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer improvements from English intermediate-task training when applied to low-resource languages in XTREME-R, and do these gains scale consistently with model size from XLM-R Base to Large?

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