Evolutionary model merging enables the creation of high-performing multi-task models but remains computationally prohibitive for consumer hardware. We introduce MERGE3, an efficient framework that makes evolutionary merging feasible on a single GPU by reducing fitness computation costs 50× while preserving performance. MERGE3 achieves this by Extracting a reduced dataset for evaluation, Estimating model abilities using Item Response Theory (IRT), and Evolving optimal merges via IRT-based performance estimators. Our method enables state-of-the-art multilingual and cross-lingual merging, transferring knowledge across languages with significantly lower computational overhead. We provide theoretical guarantees and an open-source library, democratizing high-quality model merging.
@article{arxiv.2502.10436,
title = {MERGE$^3$: Efficient Evolutionary Merging on Consumer-grade GPUs},
author = {Tommaso Mencattini and Adrian Robert Minut and Donato Crisostomi and Andrea Santilli and Emanuele Rodolà},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.10436},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
In Proceedings of The Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025)