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Related papers: What Matters for Model Merging at Scale?

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Model merging aims to cheaply combine individual task-specific models into a single multitask model. In this work, we view past merging methods as leveraging different notions of a ''task parameter subspace'' in which models are matched…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Derek Tam , Mohit Bansal , Colin Raffel

The success of pretrain-finetune paradigm brings about the release of numerous model weights. In this case, merging models finetuned on different tasks to enable a single model with multi-task capabilities is gaining increasing attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-30 Chenyu Huang , Peng Ye , Tao Chen , Tong He , Xiangyu Yue , Wanli Ouyang

Model merging techniques aim to integrate the abilities of multiple models into a single model. Most model merging techniques have hyperparameters, and their setting affects the performance of the merged model. Because several existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rio Akizuki , Yuya Kudo , Nozomu Yoshinari , Yoichi Hirose , Toshiyuki Nishimoto , Kento Uchida , Shinichi Shirakawa

Model merging combines task experts into one model and avoids joint training, retraining, or deploying many expert models, but the merged model often still underperforms task experts. We study this performance gap through feature drift, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Yanggan Gu , Shuo Cai , Zihao Wang , Wenjun Wang , Yuanyi Wang , Pengkai Wang , Sirui Huang , Su Lu , Jianmin Wu , Hongxia Yang

Model merging combines knowledge from separately fine-tuned models, yet the factors driving its success remain poorly understood. While recent work treats mergeability as an intrinsic property of the models, we show with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Luca Zhou , Bo Zhao , Rose Yu , Emanuele Rodolà

Recent advancements in building domain-specific large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success, especially in tasks requiring reasoning abilities like logical inference over complex relationships and multi-step problem solving.…

In this work, we explore the limitations of combining models by averaging intermediate features, referred to as model merging, and propose a new direction for achieving collective model intelligence through what we call compatible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Jyothish Pari , Samy Jelassi , Pulkit Agrawal

Model merging (e.g., via interpolation or task arithmetic) fuses multiple models trained on different tasks to generate a multi-task solution. The technique has been proven successful in previous studies, where the models are trained on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Yi-Lin Sung , Linjie Li , Kevin Lin , Zhe Gan , Mohit Bansal , Lijuan Wang

Model merging provides a scalable alternative to multi-task training by combining specialized finetuned models through parameter arithmetic, enabling efficient deployment without the need for joint training or access to all task data. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Yifei He , Siqi Zeng , Yuzheng Hu , Rui Yang , Tong Zhang , Han Zhao

Large-scale deep learning models with a pretraining-finetuning paradigm have led to a surge of numerous task-specific models fine-tuned from a common pre-trained model. Recently, several research efforts have been made on merging these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Yeoreum Lee , Jinwook Jung , Sungyong Baik

Model merging provides a way of cheaply combining individual models to produce a model that inherits each individual's capabilities. While some merging methods can approach the performance of multitask training, they are often heuristically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Marawan Gamal Abdel Hameed , Derek Tam , Pascal Jr Tikeng Notsawo , Colin Raffel , Guillaume Rabusseau

Model merging aims to build a multi-task learner by combining the parameters of individually fine-tuned models without additional training. While a straightforward approach is to average model parameters across tasks, this often results in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Jiho Choi , Donggyun Kim , Chanhyuk Lee , Seunghoon Hong

Mixing datasets for fine-tuning large models (LMs) has become critical for maximizing performance on downstream tasks. However, composing effective dataset mixtures typically relies on heuristics and trial-and-error, often requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Zhixu Silvia Tao , Kasper Vinken , Hao-Wei Yeh , Avi Cooper , Xavier Boix

Combining multiple machine learning models has long been a technique for enhancing performance, particularly in distributed settings. Traditional approaches, such as model ensembles, work well, but are expensive in terms of memory and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Albert Manuel Orozco Camacho , Stefan Horoi , Guy Wolf , Eugene Belilovsky

Model merging, which combines multiple models into a single model, has gained popularity in recent years. By efficiently integrating the capabilities of various models, this significantly reduces the parameter count and memory usage.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Weiyu Chen , James Kwok

Ensembling is a simple and popular technique for boosting evaluation performance by training multiple models (e.g., with different initializations) and aggregating their predictions. This approach is commonly reserved for the largest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Dan Kondratyuk , Mingxing Tan , Matthew Brown , Boqing Gong

Training of large-scale models is both computationally intensive and often constrained by the availability of labeled data. Model merging offers a compelling alternative by directly integrating the weights of multiple source models without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Tiantong Wang , Yiyang Duan , Haoyu Chen , Tiantong Wu , Wei Yang Bryan Lim

Model merging and task arithmetic have emerged as promising scalable approaches to merge multiple single-task checkpoints to one multi-task model, but their applicability is reduced by significant performance loss. Previous works have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Ke Wang , Nikolaos Dimitriadis , Guillermo Ortiz-Jimenez , François Fleuret , Pascal Frossard

Large Language Models (LLMs) require instruction fine-tuning to perform different downstream tasks. However, the instruction fine-tuning phase still demands significant computational resources and labeled data, lacking a paradigm that can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Yiguan Lin , Bin Xu , Yinghao Li , Yang Gao

Model merging has emerged as a promising approach for multi-task learning (MTL), offering a data-efficient alternative to conventional fine-tuning. However, with the rapid development of the open-source AI ecosystem and the increasing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Hao Mark Chen , Shell Xu Hu , Wayne Luk , Timothy Hospedales , Hongxiang Fan