1. Exploring Model Kinship for Merging Large Language Models
- Author
-
Hu, Yedi, Yao, Yunzhi, Zhang, Ningyu, Deng, Shumin, and Chen, Huajun
- Subjects
Computer Science - Computation and Language ,Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence ,Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition ,Computer Science - Machine Learning ,Computer Science - Multiagent Systems - Abstract
Model merging has become one of the key technologies for enhancing the capabilities and efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, our understanding of the expected performance gains and principles when merging any two models remains limited. In this work, we introduce model kinship, the degree of similarity or relatedness between LLMs, analogous to biological evolution. With comprehensive empirical analysis, we find that there is a certain relationship between model kinship and the performance gains after model merging, which can help guide our selection of candidate models. Inspired by this, we propose a new model merging strategy: Top-k Greedy Merging with Model Kinship, which can yield better performance on benchmark datasets. Specifically, we discover that using model kinship as a criterion can assist us in continuously performing model merging, alleviating the degradation (local optima) in model evolution, whereas model kinship can serve as a guide to escape these traps. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/ModelKinship., Comment: Ongoing work
- Published
- 2024