用概率推理新视角改进模型合并,提升多任务性能。
Model Merging as Probabilistic Inference in Fine-Tuning Parameter Space

- 将模型合并视为基于能量模型的泊松专家推断
- 采用柯西专家设计,更好捕捉参数残差的重尾特性
- 适用于需要高效融合多个单任务模型的研究者
模型合并旨在不依赖额外数据微调的情况下,将多个单任务模型整合为多任务模型。现有方法主要依赖局部解空间的几何特性,但难以评估不同任务更新方向在合并过程中的统计效用。本文从产品-专家(PoE)框架下的概率推断视角重新构建模型合并,将每个单任务解视为定义在合并参数上的能量基专家模型(EBM)。我们证明若干现有方法是该框架在隐含高斯假设下的特例,而实验发现这些方向残差通常具有重尾分布,与轻尾高斯假设存在不匹配。为此,提出基于柯西专家的重尾PoE设计,更准确建模残差行为,并保证推断过程可收敛。在多个任务和架构上实验表明,该方法显著优于现有基线。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Model merging aims to combine existing single-task solutions into a multi-task solution without additional data-driven fine-tuning.~Most existing approaches achieve this using geometric properties of local solution spaces. However, such geometric views provide limited guidance for scoring how statistically useful each task-specific update direction is across tasks during merging. To address this, we formulate model merging from a new perspective of probabilistic inference under a product-of-experts (PoE) scenario where each single-task solution defines an energy-based expert model (EBM) over the merged parameters. We show that several existing model merging methods arise as special cases of our framework under energy designs that impose implicit Gaussian assumptions on directional residuals between merged and task-specific models. Empirically, we find that these residuals are often heavy-tailed which exposes a mismatch with the imposed light-tailed Gaussian structures. We address this with a heavy-tailed PoE design based on Cauchy experts, which better captures the observed residual behavior while admitting a provably convergent inference procedure. Experiments across multiple tasks and architectures show significant improvements over state-of-the-arts baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/MinhLong210/PoE-EBM-Merging.git.
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