Mixup Model Merge: Enhancing Model Merging Performance through Randomized Linear Interpolation
This addresses the challenge of efficiently integrating specialized models for AI practitioners, though it is incremental as it builds on existing merging techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of merging multiple task-specific models into a unified model without additional training by proposing Mixup Model Merge (M3), which uses randomized linear interpolation in parameter space to improve performance, showing significant gains across tasks, robustness, and combination with existing methods.
Model merging aims to integrate multiple task-specific models into a unified model that inherits the capabilities of the task-specific models, without additional training. Existing model merging methods often lack consideration of the varying contribution ratios of different task-specific models to the final merged model. In this paper, we propose Mixup Model Merge (M3), a simple yet effective method inspired by the randomized linear interpolation strategy from the Mixup data augmentation technique. M3 performs randomized linear interpolation in parameter space between two task-specific LLMs, where interpolation coefficients are sampled from a Beta distribution to explore diverse contribution ratios. This controllable randomness allows M3 to outperform standard equal-ratio merging by discovering better contribution ratio combinations. Extensive experiments show that M3 significantly (1) improves merged LLM performance across tasks, (2) enhances out-of-distribution and adversarial robustness, (3) outperforms the positive effects of the sparsification method DARE on model merging and can be further combined with DARE to achieve superior results, and (4) balances exploration efficiency and diversity in contribution ratios by tuning the Beta distribution's shape parameters. The code is provided in the supplementary materials.