about
Arcee's MergeKit: A Toolkit for Merging Large Language Models (arxiv.org)
3 points by AnhTho_FR on Oct 20, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: MergeKit is a free toolkit that blends the numbers inside several trained language models into one, so the combined model keeps each model's skills without new training. Users have built thousands of merged models, some among the best open-source ones on a leaderboard.

Abstract

The rapid expansion of the open-source language model landscape presents an opportunity to merge the competencies of these model checkpoints by combining their parameters. Advances in transfer learning, the process of fine-tuning pretrained models for specific tasks, has resulted in the development of vast amounts of task-specific models, typically specialized in individual tasks and unable to utilize each other's strengths. Model merging facilitates the creation of multitask models without the need for additional training, offering a promising avenue for enhancing model performance and versatility. By preserving the intrinsic capabilities of the original models, model merging addresses complex challenges in AI - including the difficulties of catastrophic forgetting and multitask learning. To support this expanding area of research, we introduce MergeKit, a comprehensive, open-source library designed to facilitate the application of model merging strategies. MergeKit offers an extensible framework to efficiently merge models on any hardware, providing utility to researchers and practitioners. To date, thousands of models have been merged by the open-source community, leading to the creation of some of the worlds most powerful open-source model checkpoints, as assessed by the Open LLM Leaderboard. The library is accessible at https://github.com/arcee-ai/MergeKit.

Charles Goddard, Shamane Siriwardhana, Malikeh Ehghaghi, Luke Meyers, Vlad Karpukhin, Brian Benedict, Mark McQuade, Jacob Solawetz
arXiv:2403.13257 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Mar 20, 2024 · updated Jan 9, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · 11 pages, 4 figures

add comment on HN