English

Dataless Weight Disentanglement in Task Arithmetic via Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-22 v3

Abstract

Task Arithmetic yields a modular, scalable way to adapt foundation models. Combining multiple task vectors, however, can lead to cross-task interference, causing representation drift and degraded performance. Representation drift regularization provides a natural remedy to disentangle task vectors; however, existing approaches typically require external task data, conflicting with modularity and data availability constraints (e.g., privacy requirements). We propose a dataless approach by framing regularization against representation drift as a curvature matrix approximation problem. This allows us to leverage well-established techniques; in particular, we adopt Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature and obtain a practical regularizer that achieves state-of-the-art results in task addition and negation. Our method has constant complexity in the number of tasks and promotes robustness to task vector rescaling, eliminating the need for held-out tuning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.17385,
  title  = {Dataless Weight Disentanglement in Task Arithmetic via Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature},
  author = {Angelo Porrello and Pietro Buzzega and Felix Dangel and Thomas Sommariva and Riccardo Salami and Lorenzo Bonicelli and Simone Calderara},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.17385},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to ICLR 2026