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: How does the performance of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in XTREME-R compare when using different sizes of language models (e.g., 1B, 7B, 34B parameters) with a fixed number of intermediate tasks (e.g., 3 tasks)?Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 9.2/10.