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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11268 |
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| _version_ | 1866909580188975104 |
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| author | Giraldo, Juan Garcia Dimitriadis, Nikolaos Wang, Ke Frossard, Pascal |
| author_facet | Giraldo, Juan Garcia Dimitriadis, Nikolaos Wang, Ke Frossard, Pascal |
| contents | Model merging is a flexible and computationally tractable approach to merge single-task checkpoints into a multi-task model. Prior work has solely focused on constrained multi-task settings where there is a one-to-one mapping between a sample and a task, overlooking the paradigm where multiple tasks may operate on the same sample, e.g., scene understanding. In this paper, we focus on the multi-task setting with single-input-multiple-outputs (SIMO) and show that it qualitatively differs from the single-input-single-output model merging settings studied in the literature due to the existence of task-specific decoders and diverse loss objectives. We identify that existing model merging methods lead to significant performance degradation, primarily due to representation misalignment between the merged encoder and task-specific decoders. We propose two simple and efficient fixes for the SIMO setting to re-align the feature representation after merging. Compared to joint fine-tuning, our approach is computationally effective and flexible, and sheds light into identifying task relationships in an offline manner. Experiments on NYUv2, Cityscapes, and a subset of the Taskonomy dataset demonstrate: (1) task arithmetic suffices to enable multi-task capabilities; however, the representations generated by the merged encoder has to be re-aligned with the task-specific heads; (2) the proposed architecture rivals traditional multi-task learning in performance but requires fewer samples and training steps by leveraging the existence of task-specific models. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_11268 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Single-Input Multi-Output Model Merging: Leveraging Foundation Models for Dense Multi-Task Learning Giraldo, Juan Garcia Dimitriadis, Nikolaos Wang, Ke Frossard, Pascal Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence Model merging is a flexible and computationally tractable approach to merge single-task checkpoints into a multi-task model. Prior work has solely focused on constrained multi-task settings where there is a one-to-one mapping between a sample and a task, overlooking the paradigm where multiple tasks may operate on the same sample, e.g., scene understanding. In this paper, we focus on the multi-task setting with single-input-multiple-outputs (SIMO) and show that it qualitatively differs from the single-input-single-output model merging settings studied in the literature due to the existence of task-specific decoders and diverse loss objectives. We identify that existing model merging methods lead to significant performance degradation, primarily due to representation misalignment between the merged encoder and task-specific decoders. We propose two simple and efficient fixes for the SIMO setting to re-align the feature representation after merging. Compared to joint fine-tuning, our approach is computationally effective and flexible, and sheds light into identifying task relationships in an offline manner. Experiments on NYUv2, Cityscapes, and a subset of the Taskonomy dataset demonstrate: (1) task arithmetic suffices to enable multi-task capabilities; however, the representations generated by the merged encoder has to be re-aligned with the task-specific heads; (2) the proposed architecture rivals traditional multi-task learning in performance but requires fewer samples and training steps by leveraging the existence of task-specific models. |
| title | Single-Input Multi-Output Model Merging: Leveraging Foundation Models for Dense Multi-Task Learning |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11268 |