Impact of English Intermediate-Task Training on Multilingual Representation Alignment for XTREME Zero-Shot Transfer

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: To what extent does English intermediate-task training enhance the alignment of multilingual representations for zero-shot transfer on non-English tasks within the XTREME suite? Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.2/10.