用性能指标加权合并模型检查点,提升微调效果。
Parameter-Efficient Checkpoint Merging via Metrics-Weighted Averaging
- 根据训练损失或步数加权平均参数,自动分配重要性。
- 在三个任务中均超越均匀平均,最高提升5%准确率。
- 仅需一个超参数,适合资源有限的高效微调场景。
检查点合并技术可将多个模型快照整合为单一更优模型,有望缩短大语言模型的训练时间。本文研究参数高效微调(PEFT)下的检查点合并,其中仅训练小型适配模块(如LoRA)。提出一种简单有效的度量加权平均(MWA)方法,依据性能指标对模型参数进行加权。重点考察基于训练损失和训练步数的加权策略,基于低损失或后期步骤的检查点更具价值的直觉。引入带惩罚因子的公式,无论多少检查点只需一个超参数。在三个微调任务(数学推理、偏好对齐、通用指令微调)上的实验表明,MWA始终优于简单的均匀平均。值得注意的是,损失加权合并常取得最佳效果,相比基线均匀合并最高提升5%任务准确率,甚至超过最终单个检查点的表现。这些结果验证了PEFT中检查点合并的有效性,并证明基于度量的加权启发式可在极低计算开销下显著提升模型性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Checkpoint merging is a technique for combining multiple model snapshots into a single superior model, potentially reducing training time for large language models. This paper explores checkpoint merging in the context of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), where only small adapter modules (e.g. LoRA) are trained. We propose Metrics-Weighted Averaging (MWA), a simple yet effective method to merge model checkpoints by weighting their parameters according to performance metrics. In particular, we investigate weighting by training loss and by training steps, under the intuition that lower-loss or later-step checkpoints are more valuable. We introduce a formula with a penalty factor to adjust weight distribution, requiring only one hyperparameter regardless of the number of checkpoints. Experiments on three fine-tuning tasks (mathematical reasoning, preference alignment, and general instruction tuning) show that MWA consistently produces merged models that outperform the naive uniform average of checkpoints. Notably, loss-weighted merging often yields the best results, delivering up to 5% higher task accuracy than the baseline uniform merge and even surpassing the final individual checkpoint's performance. These findings validate checkpoint merging for PEFT and demonstrate that a metric-driven weighting heuristic can efficiently boost model performance with minimal computational overhead.
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