提出去中心化指令微调方法,解决模型训练中的冲突与通信瓶颈。
Decentralized Instruction Tuning: Conflict-Aware Splitting and Weight Merging

- 分块独立训练,按冲突方向拆分任务,减少梯度干扰。
- 在136个视觉任务上,平均性能从54.3提升至57.0,效果优于联合训练。
- 适合大规模异构数据混合微调,且通信开销极低,支持多模态和纯文本迁移。
指令微调使大语言模型(包括多模态模型)适配多样用户意图,但面对异构数据混合时,梯度干扰和高带宽同步成为瓶颈。本文探索是否可通过分块独立训练并在参数空间中统一融合来协同解决这两个问题。基于共享平坦区域内的局部二次理论,得出三项结论:权重合并实现曲率加权方差缩减;沿主成分分析(PCA)冲突轴拆分能最大化高曲率方向的收益;合并还兼具谱滤波与隐式范数正则化作用。据此提出MERIT——一种去中心化的可合并指令微调流程:估计数据级梯度冲突,沿前几主成分冲突轴分割混合数据集,各部分独立微调且无跨模块通信,最终通过令牌加权平均完成一次合并。在136个Vision-FLAN任务上的Qwen2.5-VL-3B模型上,平均性能由联合训练的54.3提升至57.0。同一方案扩展至176源、160万样本的7B模型,性能媲美或超越集中式联合训练,仅带来极小开销,并成功迁移到纯文本FLAN任务。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Instruction tuning aligns large language models, including multimodal ones, with diverse user intents, but scaling to heterogeneous mixtures is hindered by gradient interference and bandwidth-heavy synchronization. We ask whether these two bottlenecks can be addressed jointly by training parts of the mixture independently and reconciling them once in parameter space. We develop a local quadratic theory inside a shared flat basin that yields three results: weight merging produces a curvature-weighted variance reduction; PCA-aligned conflict splitting maximizes this gain along high-curvature directions; and merging additionally acts as spectral filtering with implicit norm regularization. These results directly motivate MERIT, a decentralized merge-ready instruction-tuning pipeline that estimates dataset-level gradient conflicts, partitions the mixture along the top PCA conflict axes, fine-tunes each partition independently with no inter-partition communication, and merges once via token-weighted averaging. On Qwen2.5-VL-3B with 136 Vision-FLAN tasks, MERIT improves the 8-benchmark average from 54.3 (joint training) to 57.0. The same recipe scales to a 7B model on a 1.6M-example, 176-source mixture -- matching or exceeding centralized joint training with minimal cost overhead -- and transfers to text-only FLAN. Our code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/merit.
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