Bayesian Model Merging
Model merging aims to combine multiple task-specific expert models into a single model without joint retraining, offering a practical alternative to multi-task learning when data access or computational budget is limited. Existing methods, however, face two key limitations: (1) they overlook the valuable inductive bias of strong anchor models and estimate the merged weights from scratch, and (2) they rely on a shared hyperparameter setting across different modules of the network, lacking a global optimization strategy. This paper introduces Bayesian Model Merging (BMM), a plug-and-play bi-level optimization framework, where the inner level formulates the model merging as an activation-based Bayesian regression under a strong prior induced by an anchor model, yielding an efficient closed-form solution; and the outer level leverages a Bayesian optimization procedure to search module-specific hyperparameters globally based on a small validation set. Furthermore, we reveal a key alignment between activation statistics and task vectors, enabling us to derive a data-free variant of BMM that estimates the Gram matrix for regression without any auxiliary data. Across extensive benchmarks, including up to 20-task merging in vision and 5-task merging in language, BMM consistently outperforms all plug-and-play anchor baselines (e.g., TA, WUDI-Merging, and TSV). In particular, on the ViT-L/14 benchmark for 8-task merging, a single merged model reaches 95.1, closely matching the average performance of eight task-specific experts (95.8).
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Multi-Task LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Connecting and Comparing Language Model Interpolation Techniques
In this work, we uncover a theoretical connection between two language model interpolation techniques, count merging and Bayesian interpolation. We compare these techniques as well as linear interpolation in three scenar…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingmodelHow to Weight Multitask Finetuning? Fast Previews via Bayesian Model-Merging
When finetuning multiple tasks altogether, it is important to carefully weigh them to get a good performance, but searching for good weights can be difficult and costly. Here, we propose to aid the search with fast previ…
BECAME: BayEsian Continual Learning with Adaptive Model MErging
Continual Learning (CL) strives to learn incrementally across tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. A key challenge in CL is balancing stability (retaining prior knowledge) and plasticity (learning new tasks). …
Continual LearningmodelAP-BMM: Approximating Capability-Cost Pareto Sets of LLMs via Asynchronous Prior-Guided Bayesian Model Merging
LLM services need to offer a family of models spanning different capability--cost trade-offs to accommodate diverse user preferences. Model merging offers a practical way to construct such a model family by combining a r…
Checkpoint Merging via Bayesian Optimization in LLM Pretraining
The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and Gemini underscores the intense demand for resources during their training processes, posing significant challenges due to substantial computationa…
Bayesian Optimization