Transport and Merge: Cross-Architecture Merging for Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong capabilities by scaling model capacity and training data, yet many real-world deployments rely on smaller models trained or adapted from low-resource data. This gap motivates the need for mechanisms to transfer knowledge from large, high-resource models to smaller, low-resource targets. While model merging provides an effective transfer mechanism, most existing approaches assume architecture-compatible models and therefore cannot directly transfer knowledge from large high-resource LLMs to heterogeneous low-resource targets. In this work, we propose a cross-architecture merging framework based on optimal transport (OT) that aligns activations to infer cross-neuron correspondences between heterogeneous models. The resulting transport plans are then used to guide direct weight-space fusion, enabling effective high-resource to low-resource transfer using only a small set of inputs. Extensive experiments across low-resource languages and specialized domains demonstrate consistent improvements over target models.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
MergeME: Model Merging Techniques for Homogeneous and Heterogeneous MoEs
The recent success of specialized Large Language Models (LLMs) in domains such as mathematical reasoning and coding has led to growing interest in methods for merging these expert LLMs into a unified Mixture-of-Experts (…
Mathematical ReasoningMixture-of-ExpertsMulti-Objective Search: Algorithms, Applications, and Emerging Directions
Multi-objective search (MOS) has emerged as a unifying framework for planning and decision-making problems where multiple, often conflicting, criteria must be balanced. While the problem has been studied for decades, rec…
Foldable SuperNets: Scalable Merging of Transformers with Different Initializations and Tasks
Many recent methods aim to merge neural networks (NNs) with identical architectures trained on different tasks to obtain a single multi-task model. Most existing works tackle the simpler setup of merging NNs initialized …
Knowledge DistillationStatsMerging: Statistics-Guided Model Merging via Task-Specific Teacher Distillation
Model merging has emerged as a promising solution to accommodate multiple large models within constrained memory budgets. We present StatsMerging, a novel lightweight learning-based model merging method guided by weight …
Knowledge DistillationDemystifying Mergeability: Interpretable Properties to Predict Model Merging Success
Model merging combines knowledge from separately fine-tuned models, yet the factors driving its success remain poorly understood. While recent work treats mergeability as an intrinsic property of the models, we show with…