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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17109 |
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| _version_ | 1866908915969556480 |
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| author | Moayedikia, Alireza Troncoso, Alicia |
| author_facet | Moayedikia, Alireza Troncoso, Alicia |
| contents | Training large neural networks and merging task-specific models both exploit low-rank structure and require parameter importance estimation, yet these challenges have been pursued in isolation. Current workflows compute curvature information during training, discard it, then recompute similar information for merging--wasting computation and discarding valuable trajectory data. We introduce a unified framework that maintains factorized momentum and curvature statistics during training, then reuses this information for geometry-aware model composition. The proposed method incurs modest memory overhead (approximately 30% over AdamW) to accumulate task saliency scores that enable curvature-aware merging. These scores, computed as a byproduct of optimization, provide importance estimates comparable to post-hoc Fisher computation while producing merge-ready models directly from training. We establish convergence guarantees for non-convex objectives with approximation error bounded by gradient singular value decay. On natural language understanding benchmarks, curvature-aware parameter selection outperforms magnitude-only baselines across all sparsity levels, with multi-task merging improving 1.6% over strong baselines. The proposed framework exhibits rank-invariant convergence and superior hyperparameter robustness compared to existing low-rank optimizers. By treating the optimization trajectory as a reusable asset rather than discarding it, our approach demonstrates that training-time curvature information suffices for effective model composition, enabling a unified training-merging pipeline. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_17109 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Bridging Training and Merging Through Momentum-Aware Optimization Moayedikia, Alireza Troncoso, Alicia Machine Learning Training large neural networks and merging task-specific models both exploit low-rank structure and require parameter importance estimation, yet these challenges have been pursued in isolation. Current workflows compute curvature information during training, discard it, then recompute similar information for merging--wasting computation and discarding valuable trajectory data. We introduce a unified framework that maintains factorized momentum and curvature statistics during training, then reuses this information for geometry-aware model composition. The proposed method incurs modest memory overhead (approximately 30% over AdamW) to accumulate task saliency scores that enable curvature-aware merging. These scores, computed as a byproduct of optimization, provide importance estimates comparable to post-hoc Fisher computation while producing merge-ready models directly from training. We establish convergence guarantees for non-convex objectives with approximation error bounded by gradient singular value decay. On natural language understanding benchmarks, curvature-aware parameter selection outperforms magnitude-only baselines across all sparsity levels, with multi-task merging improving 1.6% over strong baselines. The proposed framework exhibits rank-invariant convergence and superior hyperparameter robustness compared to existing low-rank optimizers. By treating the optimization trajectory as a reusable asset rather than discarding it, our approach demonstrates that training-time curvature information suffices for effective model composition, enabling a unified training-merging pipeline. |
| title | Bridging Training and Merging Through Momentum-Aware Optimization |
| topic | Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17109 |