StatsMerging: Statistics-Guided Model Merging via Task-Specific Teacher Distillation
This addresses memory efficiency for deploying multiple AI models, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing model merging techniques with specific enhancements.
The paper tackles the problem of merging multiple large models under memory constraints by introducing StatsMerging, a method that uses weight distribution statistics and task-specific teacher distillation without requiring labels or test samples, achieving state-of-the-art performance in accuracy, generalization, and robustness across eight tasks.
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 distribution statistics without requiring ground truth labels or test samples. StatsMerging offers three key advantages: (1) It uniquely leverages singular values from singular value decomposition (SVD) to capture task-specific weight distributions, serving as a proxy for task importance to guide task coefficient prediction; (2) It employs a lightweight learner StatsMergeLearner to model the weight distributions of task-specific pre-trained models, improving generalization and enhancing adaptation to unseen samples; (3) It introduces Task-Specific Teacher Distillation for merging vision models with heterogeneous architectures, a merging learning paradigm that avoids costly ground-truth labels by task-specific teacher distillation. Notably, we present two types of knowledge distillation, (a) distilling knowledge from task-specific models to StatsMergeLearner; and (b) distilling knowledge from models with heterogeneous architectures prior to merging. Extensive experiments across eight tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of StatsMerging. Our results show that StatsMerging outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of overall accuracy, generalization to unseen tasks, and robustness to image quality variations.