MergeME: Model Merging Techniques for Homogeneous and Heterogeneous MoEs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhou, Yuhang, Karamanolakis, Giannis, Soto, Victor, Rumshisky, Anna, Kulkarni, Mayank, Huang, Furong, Ai, Wei, Lu, Jianhua
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zhou, Yuhang
Karamanolakis, Giannis
Soto, Victor
Rumshisky, Anna
Kulkarni, Mayank
Huang, Furong
Ai, Wei
Lu, Jianhua
author_facet Zhou, Yuhang
Karamanolakis, Giannis
Soto, Victor
Rumshisky, Anna
Kulkarni, Mayank
Huang, Furong
Ai, Wei
Lu, Jianhua
contents The recent success of specialized Large Language Models (LLMs) in domains such as mathematical reasoning and coding has led to growing interest in methods for merging these expert LLMs into a unified Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, with the goal of enhancing performance in each domain while retaining effectiveness on general tasks. However, the effective merging of expert models remains an open challenge, especially for models with highly divergent weight parameters or different architectures. State-of-the-art MoE merging methods only work with homogeneous model architectures and rely on simple unweighted averaging to merge expert layers, which does not address parameter interference and requires extensive fine-tuning of the merged MoE to restore performance. To address these limitations, this paper introduces new MoE merging techniques, including strategies to mitigate parameter interference, routing heuristics to reduce the need for MoE fine-tuning, and a novel method for merging experts with different architectures. Extensive experiments across multiple domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, reducing fine-tuning costs, improving performance over state-of-the-art methods, and expanding the applicability of MoE merging.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_00997
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MergeME: Model Merging Techniques for Homogeneous and Heterogeneous MoEs
Zhou, Yuhang
Karamanolakis, Giannis
Soto, Victor
Rumshisky, Anna
Kulkarni, Mayank
Huang, Furong
Ai, Wei
Lu, Jianhua
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The recent success of specialized Large Language Models (LLMs) in domains such as mathematical reasoning and coding has led to growing interest in methods for merging these expert LLMs into a unified Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, with the goal of enhancing performance in each domain while retaining effectiveness on general tasks. However, the effective merging of expert models remains an open challenge, especially for models with highly divergent weight parameters or different architectures. State-of-the-art MoE merging methods only work with homogeneous model architectures and rely on simple unweighted averaging to merge expert layers, which does not address parameter interference and requires extensive fine-tuning of the merged MoE to restore performance. To address these limitations, this paper introduces new MoE merging techniques, including strategies to mitigate parameter interference, routing heuristics to reduce the need for MoE fine-tuning, and a novel method for merging experts with different architectures. Extensive experiments across multiple domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, reducing fine-tuning costs, improving performance over state-of-the-art methods, and expanding the applicability of MoE merging.
title MergeME: Model Merging Techniques for Homogeneous and Heterogeneous MoEs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00997