Parameter Competition Balancing for Model Merging

While fine-tuning pretrained models has become common practice, these models often underperform outside their specific domains. Recently developed model merging techniques enable the direct integration of multiple models, each fine-tuned for distinct tasks, into a single model. This strategy promotes multitasking capabilities without requiring retraining on the original datasets. However, existing methods fall short in addressing potential conflicts and complex correlations between tasks, especially in parameter-level adjustments, posing a challenge in effectively balancing parameter competition across various tasks. This paper introduces an innovative technique named PCB-Merging (Parameter Competition Balancing), a lightweight and training-free technique that adjusts the coefficients of each parameter for effective model merging. PCB-Merging employs intra-balancing to gauge parameter significance within individual tasks and inter-balancing to assess parameter similarities across different tasks. Parameters with low importance scores are dropped, and the remaining ones are rescaled to form the final merged model. We assessed our approach in diverse merging scenarios, including cross-task, cross-domain, and cross-training configurations, as well as out-of-domain generalization. The experimental results reveal that our approach achieves substantial performance enhancements across multiple modalities, domains, model sizes, number of tasks, fine-tuning forms, and large language models, outperforming existing model merging methods. The code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/duguodong7/pcb-merging}.

Paper

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Peer review

Reviewer s8Ho7/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-09

Summary

This paper introduces an innovative technique named PCB-MERGING (Parameter Competition Balancing), a lightweight and training-free technique that adjusts the coefficients of each parameter for effective model merging.

Strengths

1. This paper re-examines existing model merging methods, highlighting the critical role of parameter competition awareness; 2. This paper introduce a novel approach called PCB-MERGING, which effectively adjusts parameter coefficients through balancing parameter competition; 3. The method stabilizes and enhances model merging performance across various application scenarios without additional training.

Weaknesses

1. Figure 1 and 2 need to be re-explained. The meaning of the percentage is confusing. Does it refer to the pruning ratio or the proportion of adjusted key parameters? The meaning of scale also needs to be re-explained. 2. The time complexity in MOEA is a crucial topic for discussion. If additional MOEA-related algorithms are introduced, a time complexity analysis needs to be conducted. 3. An important mathematical symbols have not been defined, circle with dot. 4. The code seems unavailable? I'm curious about the process of selecting the task vector.

Questions

Described in weaknesses. I might improve the rating if my questions are well addressed.

Rating

7

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

4

Limitations

Described in weaknesses. I might improve the rating if my questions are well addressed.

Reviewer 28gt6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-12

Summary

The authors propose an improved method to merge task vectors, called Parameter Competition Balancing (PCB-merging). The proposed method is simple, efficient, and attains superior performance in evaluations.

Strengths

1. In Figure 1, the authors show a very interesting phenomena, where scaling the top percentiles of a task vector outperforms fine tuning. 2. The proposed method is very simple. It can be implemented in a few lines of code, requires very little memory or computation, and does not require additional data. These are crucial advantages that make PCB-merging highly practical when also considering its improved performance. 3. The method performs well, surpassing TIES-merging, Task Arithmetic, RegMean, and standard averaging in a variety of settings.

Weaknesses

1. The paper has numerous typos.

Questions

1. In the introduction for Figure 1, it's not quite clear what "Magnitude" refers to. Is it the magnitude in the task vector or the magnitude after the task vector has been applied? This is answered later but it would be helpful to add a word or two to clear this up in the introduction. 2. I am a bit confused about the actual operations used for the parameter balancing. I am interpreting ⊙ as an element-wise product. Thus τᵢ ⊙ τᵢ is a vector and Norm(τᵢ ⊙ τᵢ) would be a scalar, but Softmax requires a vector. It might be helpful to clarify the notation in Section 3.2 a bit more.

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

1. The authors point out that the mechanism leading to the improved performance is not well understood. 2. The merging method likely cannot be used to merge models that are fine tuned from different pretrained models. I believe both of these limitations are acceptable.

Reviewer 6PSY5/10 · confidence 5/52024-07-18

Summary

This paper focuses on the model merging problem. The authors propose PSC-MERGING to adjust the coefficients of each parameter for effective model merging. Specifically, PSC-MERGING uses intra-balancing to weight the importance of parameters within tasks and inter-balancing to assess parameter similarities across tasks. Parameters with low importance scores are dropped, and the remaining ones are rescaled to form the final merged model. The authors conduct extensive experiments to validate the proposed method.

Strengths

+ The paper is well organized. The motivation is well provided and the authors make a comprehensive survey on the related works. + The authors conduct extensive experiments, including cross-task merging, cross-domain merging, cross-training configuration merging and out-of-domain generalization, to validate the proposed method. The proposed method shows clear superiority in all these settings.

Weaknesses

+ The proposed method introduces an hyperparameter r in Eqn. (3). From Figure 6, it can be seen that the performance is highly sensitive to this hyperparameter, which may make the proposed method not easy to use in practice. Furthermore, the authors claim “For TIES-Merging and PCB-MERGING, which require a masking ratio, we set mask ratio r = 0.2 as the default value for all experiments, except in LLM experiments where r = 0.1.” However, From Figure 6 it is obviously that the optimal r should be 0 instead of 0.2. The setting of the hyperparameter r should be more justified. + Another concern is that the authors use quite different search space when setting the hyperparameter lambda, as described in Line #217~222. Why does the search range of this parameter vary so much under different methods? Will it incur any unfair comparison? The rationale for such settings should be provided. + The proposed method relies on shared initializations, which significantly limits its applicability as acknowledged by the authors.

Questions

Please see the Weaknesses

Rating

5

Confidence

5

Soundness

3

Presentation

4

Contribution

3

Limitations

N/A

Reviewer Zv3Q2024-08-12

Thanks for the response. I keep my score as is.

Reviewer 28gt2024-08-12

I would like to thank the authors for their rebuttal. My concerns have been addressed, but since I did not note any major issues to begin with, I will keep my score.

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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