Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is a central task in multilingual NLP, allowing models trained in languages with more sufficient training resources to generalize to other low-resource languages. Earlier efforts on this task use parallel corpora, bilingual dictionaries, or other annotated alignment data to improve cross-lingual transferability, which are typically expensive to obtain. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method, SALT, to improve the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer of the multilingual pretrained language models without the help of such external data. By incorporatiResearch goal: Do intermediate tasks like code generation (e.g., HumanEval) improve zero-shot cross-lingual performance on code-related benchmarks like MBXPPL more than general language understanding tasks?Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 7.5/10.