ICML2025

KIND: Knowledge Integration and Diversion for Training Decomposable Models

Yucheng Xie, Fu Feng, Ruixiao Shi, Jing Wang, Yong Rui, Xin Geng

Abstract

Pre-trained models have become the preferred backbone due to the increasing complexity of model parameters. However, traditional pretrained models often face deployment challenges due to their fixed sizes, and are prone to negative transfer when discrepancies arise between training tasks and target tasks. To address this, we propose KIND, a novel pre-training method designed to construct decomposable models. KIND integrates knowledge by incorporating Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) as a structural constraint, with each basic component represented as a combination of a column vector, singular value, and row vector from U , Σ, and V ⊤ matrices. These components are categorized into learngenes for encapsulating class-agnostic knowledge and tailors for capturing class-specific knowledge, with knowledge diversion facilitated by a class gate mechanism during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models pretrained with KIND can be decomposed into learngenes and tailors, which can be adaptively recombined for diverse resource-constrained deployments. Moreover, for tasks with large domain shifts, transferring only learngenes with task-agnostic knowledge, when combined with randomly initialized tailors, effectively mitigates domain shifts. Code will be made available at https://github.com/Te4P0t/KIND .