Related papers: Merge to Learn: Efficiently Adding Skills to Langu…

Merging Large Language Models (LLMs) is a cost-effective technique for combining multiple expert LLMs into a single versatile model, retaining the expertise of the original ones. However, current approaches often overlook the importance of…

Fine-tuning a task-specific multilingual large language model (LLM) involves training the model on a multilingual dataset with examples in all the required languages. Updating one or more supported languages with additional data or adding…

Model merging has emerged as a promising technique for enhancing large language models, though its application in large-scale pre-training remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we present a comprehensive investigation of model…

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain heavily centered on English, with limited performance in low-resource languages. Existing adaptation approaches, such as continual pre-training, demand significant computational resources. In the case of…

Continual learning is conventionally tackled through sequential fine-tuning, a process that, while enabling adaptation, inherently favors plasticity over the stability needed to retain prior knowledge. While existing approaches attempt to…

Endowing models with consistent multilingual performance can be achieved by mixing pre-training data, or post-training approaches such as language-specific model merging. In this work, we test whether merging can be applied to monolingually…

Achieving high-performing language models which include medium- and lower-resource languages remains a challenge. Massively multilingual models still underperform compared to language-specific adaptations, especially at smaller model…

Model merging combines the parameters of multiple neural networks into a single model without additional training. As fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) proliferate, merging offers a computationally efficient alternative to ensembles…

Model merging is an efficient empowerment technique in the machine learning community that does not require the collection of raw training data and does not require expensive computation. As model merging becomes increasingly prevalent…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been adopted and deployed worldwide for a broad variety of applications. However, ensuring their safe use remains a significant challenge. Preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms…

Large language models (LLMs) still struggle across tasks outside of high-resource languages. In this work, we investigate cross-lingual transfer to lower-resource languages where task-specific post-training data is scarce. Building on prior…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, notably degrading the safety of originally aligned models. While some existing methods attempt to restore safety by incorporating…

This paper investigates the linear merging of models in the context of continual learning (CL). Using controlled visual cues in computer vision experiments, we demonstrate that merging largely preserves or enhances shared knowledge, while…

We present Branch-Train-Merge (BTM), a communication-efficient algorithm for embarrassingly parallel training of large language models (LLMs). We show it is possible to independently train subparts of a new class of LLMs on different…

Continual Learning (CL) aims to enable models to continuously acquire new knowledge from a sequence of tasks with avoiding the forgetting of learned information. However, existing CL methods only rely on the parameters of the most recent…

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…

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to new languages typically involves continual pre-training (CT) followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this CT-then-SFT approach struggles with limited data in the context of low-resource…

In the era of large language models, model merging is a promising way to combine multiple task-specific models into a single multitask model without extra training. However, two challenges remain: (a) interference between different models…

Continual learning (CL) is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in dynamic real-world environments without the need for costly retraining. Recent model merging-based methods have attracted significant attention, but they…

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to empower a model to tackle multiple tasks simultaneously. A recent development known as task arithmetic has revealed that several models, each fine-tuned for distinct tasks, can be directly merged into a…