Enhancing Cross-lingual Transfer by Manifold Mixup

Huiyun Yang, Huadong Chen, Hao Zhou, Lei Li

Keywords: cross-lingual transfer, cross-lingual understanding, manifold mixup

Abstract: Based on large-scale pre-trained multilingual representations, recent cross-lingual transfer methods have achieved impressive transfer performances. However, the performance of target languages still lags far behind the source language. In this paper, our analyses indicate such a performance gap is strongly associated with the cross-lingual representation discrepancy. To achieve better cross-lingual transfer performance, we propose the cross-lingual manifold mixup (X-Mixup) method, which adaptively calibrates the representation discrepancy and gives a compromised representation for target languages. Experiments on the XTREME benchmark show X-Mixup achieves 1.8% performance gains on multiple text understanding tasks, compared with strong baselines, and significantly reduces the cross-lingual representation discrepancy.

One-sentence Summary: We propose the cross-lingual manifold mixup method to improve the cross-lingual transfer.

Community Implementations: [ 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2205.04182/code)