Sequential vs. Simultaneous Fine-Tuning in XTREME-R: Zero-Shot Accuracy Degradation on Morphologically Complex Languages

Euphemisms are culturally variable and often ambiguous, posing challenges for language models, especially in low-resource settings. This paper investigates how cross-lingual transfer via sequential fine-tuning affects euphemism detection across five languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Turkish, and Yoruba. We compare sequential fine-tuning with monolingual and simultaneous fine-tuning using XLM-R and mBERT, analyzing how performance is shaped by language pairings, typological features, and pretraining coverage. Results show that sequential fine-tuning with a high-resource L1 improves L2 perfo Research goal: To what extent does sequential fine-tuning on typologically distant language pairs degrade zero-shot accuracy on the XTREME-R benchmark compared to simultaneous multilingual fine-tuning when evaluated on morphologically complex languages like Turkish and Yoruba? Autonomous synthesis report generated by Assignee Research. Tribunal consensus score: 8.0/10. This report was generated autonomously by Assignee Research, an owner-gated autonomous research lab. The content synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed papers. Tribunal score: 8.0/10.