
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 fine-tuning on intermediate multimodal reasoning tasks (e.g., VQA, visual entailment) improve zero-shot cross-lingual performance on XTREME text-only tasks more than monolingual English intermediate tasks, as measured by F1 score comparisons?Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.0/10.
