Selecting and Merging: Towards Adaptable and Scalable Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Ding, Zhuojun, Wei, Wei, Fan, Chenghao
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866916814808678400
author Ding, Zhuojun
Wei, Wei
Fan, Chenghao
author_facet Ding, Zhuojun
Wei, Wei
Fan, Chenghao
contents Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with information extraction (IE) tasks, such as named entity recognition (NER). However, annotating such fine-grained labels and training domain-specific models is costly. Existing works typically train a unified model across multiple domains, but such approaches lack adaptation and scalability since not all training data benefits target domains and scaling trained models remains challenging. We propose the SaM framework, which dynamically Selects and Merges expert models at inference time. Specifically, for a target domain, we select domain-specific experts pre-trained on existing domains based on (i) domain similarity to the target domain and (ii) performance on sampled instances, respectively. The experts are then merged to create task-specific models optimized for the target domain. By dynamically merging experts beneficial to target domains, we improve generalization across various domains without extra training. Additionally, experts can be added or removed conveniently, leading to great scalability. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, which outperforms the unified model by an average of 10%. We further provide insights into potential improvements, practical experience, and extensions of our framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_22813
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Selecting and Merging: Towards Adaptable and Scalable Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models
Ding, Zhuojun
Wei, Wei
Fan, Chenghao
Computation and Language
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with information extraction (IE) tasks, such as named entity recognition (NER). However, annotating such fine-grained labels and training domain-specific models is costly. Existing works typically train a unified model across multiple domains, but such approaches lack adaptation and scalability since not all training data benefits target domains and scaling trained models remains challenging. We propose the SaM framework, which dynamically Selects and Merges expert models at inference time. Specifically, for a target domain, we select domain-specific experts pre-trained on existing domains based on (i) domain similarity to the target domain and (ii) performance on sampled instances, respectively. The experts are then merged to create task-specific models optimized for the target domain. By dynamically merging experts beneficial to target domains, we improve generalization across various domains without extra training. Additionally, experts can be added or removed conveniently, leading to great scalability. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, which outperforms the unified model by an average of 10%. We further provide insights into potential improvements, practical experience, and extensions of our framework.
title Selecting and Merging: Towards Adaptable and Scalable Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22813