Does fine-tuning a multilingual LLM on English intermediate tasks (e.g., NLI, QA) before target-task fine-tuning improve XTREME-R

Abstract

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: Does fine-tuning a multilingual LLM on English intermediate tasks (e.g., NLI, QA) before target-task fine-tuning improve XTREME-R performance more than intermediate training in the target language? Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 7.8/10.