Cross-Model Transfer of Task Vectors via Few-Shot Orthogonal Alignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kawamoto, Kazuhiko, Endo, Atsuhiro, Kera, Hiroshi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kawamoto, Kazuhiko
Endo, Atsuhiro
Kera, Hiroshi
author_facet Kawamoto, Kazuhiko
Endo, Atsuhiro
Kera, Hiroshi
contents Task arithmetic enables efficient model editing by representing task-specific changes as vectors in parameter space. Task arithmetic typically assumes that the source and target models are initialized from the same pre-trained parameters. This assumption limits its applicability in cross-model transfer settings, where models are independently pre-trained on different datasets. To address this challenge, we propose a method based on few-shot orthogonal alignment, which aligns task vectors to the parameter space of a differently pre-trained target model. These transformations preserve key properties of task vectors, such as norm and rank, and are learned using only a small number of labeled examples. We evaluate the method using two Vision Transformers pre-trained on YFCC100M and LAION400M, and test on eight classification datasets. Experimental results show that our method improves transfer accuracy over direct task vector application and achieves performance comparable to few-shot fine-tuning, while maintaining the modularity and reusability of task vectors. Our code is available at https://github.com/kawakera-lab/CrossModelTransfer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12021
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cross-Model Transfer of Task Vectors via Few-Shot Orthogonal Alignment
Kawamoto, Kazuhiko
Endo, Atsuhiro
Kera, Hiroshi
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Task arithmetic enables efficient model editing by representing task-specific changes as vectors in parameter space. Task arithmetic typically assumes that the source and target models are initialized from the same pre-trained parameters. This assumption limits its applicability in cross-model transfer settings, where models are independently pre-trained on different datasets. To address this challenge, we propose a method based on few-shot orthogonal alignment, which aligns task vectors to the parameter space of a differently pre-trained target model. These transformations preserve key properties of task vectors, such as norm and rank, and are learned using only a small number of labeled examples. We evaluate the method using two Vision Transformers pre-trained on YFCC100M and LAION400M, and test on eight classification datasets. Experimental results show that our method improves transfer accuracy over direct task vector application and achieves performance comparable to few-shot fine-tuning, while maintaining the modularity and reusability of task vectors. Our code is available at https://github.com/kawakera-lab/CrossModelTransfer.
title Cross-Model Transfer of Task Vectors via Few-Shot Orthogonal Alignment
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12021