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EMNLP Findings2025

FroM: Frobenius Norm-Based Data-Free Adaptive Model Merging

Zijian Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Huixin Liu, Yichong Huang, Ting Liu, Bing Qin

Abstract

With the development of large language models, fine-tuning has emerged as an effective method to enhance performance in specific scenarios by injecting domain-specific knowledge. In this context, model merging techniques provide a solution for fusing knowledge from multiple fine-tuning models by combining their parameters. However, traditional methods often encounter task interference when merging full fine-tuning models, and this problem becomes even more evident in parameter-efficient finetuning scenarios. In this paper, we introduce an improvement to the RegMean method, which indirectly leverages the training data to approximate the outputs of the linear layers before and after merging. We propose an adaptive merging method called FroM, which directly measures the model parameters using the Frobenius norm, without any training data. By introducing an additional hyperparameter for control, FroM outperforms baseline methods across various fine-tuning scenarios, alleviating the task interference problem.

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Builds on20

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  5. Federated Learning with Matched AveragingHongyi Wang, Mikhail Yurochkin, Yuekai Sun, Dimitris S. Papailiopoulos et al.ICLR 2020 · 1,368 citations

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