Impact of Multi-Task Intermediate Training on mT5's Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Performance

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 impact of combining multiple English intermediate tasks (e.g., NLI, QA, NER) on mT5's zero-shot cross-lingual EXACT match performance compared to single-task intermediate training, measured by XTREME-M benchmark accuracy? Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.3/10.