arXiv:2312. 06173v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Merging models fine-tuned from a common, extensively pre-trained large model but specialized for different tasks has been demonstrated as a cheap and scalable strategy to construct a multi-task model that performs well across diverse tasks.
By Anke Tang, Xianglin Luo, Li Shen, Yong Luo, Liang Ding, Han Hu, Bo Du, Dacheng Tao
arXiv:2606. 19164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model.
By Longhua Li, Lei Qi, Xin Geng, Qi Tian
The paper introduces a data‑free method for model merging that estimates per‑layer covariance matrices directly from difference matrices, eliminating the need for auxiliary data. This approach reduces computational costs while maintaining a principled interference‑minimization framework. Experiments on vision and language benchmarks with models from 86 M to 7 B parameters show that the method outperforms existing data‑free merging techniques.
By Marawan Gamal Abdel Hameed, Derek Tam, Pascal Jr Tikeng Notsawo, Colin Raffel, Guillaume Rabusseau
arXiv:2606. 18627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a training-free alternative to multi-task learning, aiming to combine multiple task-specific fine-tuned models into a single multi-task model.
By Ningyuan Shi, Zhipeng Zhou, Hao Wang, Chunyan Miao, Peilin Zhao
arXiv:2606. 22589v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Ever since the advent of foundation models and the pre-training-finetuning paradigm, there have been numerous efforts to merge multiple task-specific experts into a single multi-task model.
By Jungyong Son, Jinwook Jung, Sungyong Baik
The paper proposes a sensitivity‑aware residual‑stream pruning method for large language models that goes beyond minimizing activation reconstruction error. By using a second‑order approximation of output KL divergence, the authors derive a spectral upper bound that selects pruning subspaces based on both activation covariance and output sensitivity, enabling efficient eigendecomposition. Experiments on instruction‑tuned language models show that this approach consistently reduces calibration KL divergence, improves perplexity, and enhances downstream task performance across various compression levels.
By Chayne Thrash, Kevin Chen, Soheil Kolouri
arXiv:2607. 02681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Integrating information across related tasks can improve estimation and prediction in transfer, multi-task, and federated learning, but contamination and heterogeneity make robust borrowing challenging.
By Ye Tian, Mengchu Li, Marco Avella Medina
The paper introduces a new multi‑task model‑merging framework that tackles task interference by projecting task vectors into a high‑dimensional sparse feature space using Sparse Autoencoders, enabling feature‑level disentanglement before fusion. It also proposes a lightweight Group‑Ranked Zeroth‑Order Optimizer to identify task‑critical layers for selective merging, reducing computational overhead. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑1.5B and Qwen2.5‑7B show consistent performance gains over several baselines across reasoning, code generation, instruction following, and general knowledge tasks, with a 2.78% improvement in a highly conflicting four‑task setting.
By Yihang Zhang, Shengke Sun, Junjie Wen, Feng Zeng
arXiv:2608. 01422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine unlearning seeks to remove targeted information from trained models without requiring costly retraining.
By Tyler Lizzo, Larry Heck
arXiv:2602. 09530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce AutoSpec, a neural network framework for discovering iterative spectral algorithms for large-scale numerical linear algebra and numerical optimization.
By Zihang Liu, Oleg Balabanov, Yaoqing Yang, Michael W. Mahoney
arXiv:2606. 00573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) deliver strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, but their large computational cost and high parameter counts make deployment challenging on resource-constrained devices.
By Haiyu Wang, Yutong Wang, Leshu Li, Yihui Ren, Sai Qian Zhang
arXiv:2608.27518v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Continual learning (CL) and model merging (MM) both aim to obtain a single model that performs well across multiple tasks, challenged respectively by c...
By Shangge Liu, Yuehan Yin, Yinghuan Shi, Lei Wang, Wenbin Li