Effectiveness of Multi-Task vs. Single-Task Intermediate Training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer on 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: What is the relative effectiveness of multi-task intermediate-task training (combining 3+ tasks) versus single-task intermediate training for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on XTREME-R, measured by accuracy and inference latency? Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.0/10.