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 tasResearch goal: Does the choice of multilingual intermediate tasks (e.g., language-agnostic vs. language-specific) impact the robustness of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer across diverse languages in XTREME-R, and how does this compare to monolingual English intermediate tasks?Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.9/10.