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Deep Neural Network (DNN) models are usually trained sequentially from one layer to another, which causes forward, backward and update locking's problems, leading to poor performance in terms of training time. The existing parallel…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2022-07-25 Samson B. Akintoye , Liangxiu Han , Huw Lloyd , Xin Zhang , Darren Dancey , Haoming Chen , Daoqiang Zhang

As scaled language models (LMs) approach human-level reasoning capabilities, self-improvement emerges as a solution to synthesizing high-quality data corpus. While previous research has identified model collapse as a risk in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Xiangchi Yuan , Chunhui Zhang , Zheyuan Liu , Dachuan Shi , Leyan Pan , Soroush Vosoughi , Wenke Lee

Recent advances in deep learning have led to a surge of open-source models across diverse domains. While model merging offers a promising way to combine their strengths, existing approaches often suffer from parameter conflicts that degrade…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Yunfei Liang

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

We propose Chain-of-Experts (CoE), a new Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that introduces sequential expert communication within each layer. Unlike traditional MoE models, where experts operate independently in parallel, CoE processes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Zihan Wang , Rui Pan , Jiarui Yao , Robert Csordas , Linjie Li , Lu Yin , Jiajun Wu , Tong Zhang , Manling Li , Shiwei Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is central to post-training, particularly for agentic models that require specialized reasoning behaviors. In this setting, model merging offers a practical mechanism for integrating multiple RL-trained agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xiangchi Yuan , Dachuan Shi , Chunhui Zhang , Zheyuan Liu , Shenglong Yao , Soroush Vosoughi , Wenke Lee

Model merging offers a training-free alternative to multi-task learning by combining independently fine-tuned models into a unified one without access to raw data. However, existing approaches often rely on heuristics to determine the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Chongjie Si , Kangtao Lv , Jingjing Jiang , Yadao Wang , Yongwei Wang , Xiaokang Yang , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng , Wei Shen

Model merging enables powerful capabilities in neural networks without requiring additional training. In this paper, we introduce a novel perspective on model merging by leveraging the fundamental mechanisms of neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Haiquan Qiu , You Wu , Dong Li , Jianmin Guo , Quanming Yao

Model merging has emerged as a cost-efficient approximation to multitask learning. Among merging strategies, task arithmetic is notable for its simplicity and effectiveness. In this work, we provide a theoretical motivation for task vectors…

Recent large reasoning models (LRMs) have made substantial progress in complex reasoning tasks, yet they often generate lengthy reasoning paths for every query, incurring unnecessary computation and latency. Existing speed-up approaches…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zhaofeng Zhong , Wei Yuan , Tong Chen , Xiangyu Zhao , Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen , Hongzhi Yin

Model merging offers a scalable alternative to multi-task learning but often yields suboptimal performance on classification tasks. We attribute this degradation to a geometric misalignment between the merged encoder and static…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Fanshuang Kong , Richong Zhang , Zhijie Nie , Hang Zhou , Ziqiao Wang , Qiang Sun , Chunming Hu

Model merging acquires general capabilities without extra data or training by combining multiple models' parameters. Previous approaches achieve linear mode connectivity by aligning parameters into the same loss basin using permutation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Yi-Kai Zhang , Jin Wang , Xu-Xiang Zhong , De-Chuan Zhan , Han-Jia Ye

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) achieves outstanding success in self-supervised representation learning. Unfortunately, MIM models typically have huge computational burden and slow learning process, which is an inevitable obstacle for their…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Haoqing Wang , Yehui Tang , Yunhe Wang , Jianyuan Guo , Zhi-Hong Deng , Kai Han

Recent works show that reducing the number of layers in a convolutional neural network can enhance efficiency while maintaining the performance of the network. Existing depth compression methods remove redundant non-linear activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Jinuk Kim , Marwa El Halabi , Mingi Ji , Hyun Oh Song

Lately, the practice of utilizing task-specific fine-tuning has been implemented to improve the performance of large language models (LLM) in subsequent tasks. Through the integration of diverse LLMs, the overall competency of LLMs is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Mingyang Zhang , Jing Liu , Ganggui Ding , Xinyi Yu , Linlin Ou , Bohan Zhuang

Model merging aggregates Large Language Models (LLMs) finetuned on different tasks into a stronger one. However, parameter conflicts between models leads to performance degradation in averaging. While model routing addresses this issue by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Kunfeng Lai , Zhenheng Tang , Xinglin Pan , Peijie Dong , Xiang Liu , Haolan Chen , Li Shen , Bo Li , Xiaowen Chu

Fine-tuning pre-trained models has become the standard approach to endow them with specialized knowledge, but it poses fundamental challenges. In particular, \textit{(i)} fine-tuning often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where…

Continual Model Merging (CMM) enables rapid customization of foundation models by sequentially incorporating task-adapted models without repeated retraining. However, existing merging rules usually update the deployed model through fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Lihong Lin , Haidong Kang

Transfer learning has become a powerful tool to initialize deep learning models to achieve faster convergence and higher performance. This is especially useful in the medical imaging analysis domain, where data scarcity limits possible…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Ibrahim Almakky , Santosh Sanjeev , Anees Ur Rehman Hashmi , Mohammad Areeb Qazi , Hu Wang , Mohammad Yaqub

The escalating scale of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates efficient adaptation techniques. Model merging has gained prominence for its efficiency and controllability. However, existing merging techniques typically serve as post-hoc…