Model soups need only one ingredient

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Abdollahpoorrostam, Alireza, Dimitriadis, Nikolaos, Hazimeh, Adam, Frossard, Pascal
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Abdollahpoorrostam, Alireza
Dimitriadis, Nikolaos
Hazimeh, Adam
Frossard, Pascal
author_facet Abdollahpoorrostam, Alireza
Dimitriadis, Nikolaos
Hazimeh, Adam
Frossard, Pascal
contents Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on a target distribution often improves in-distribution (ID) accuracy, but at the cost of out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness as representations specialize to the fine-tuning data. Weight-space ensembling methods, such as Model Soups, mitigate this effect by averaging multiple checkpoints, but they are computationally prohibitive, requiring the training and storage of dozens of fine-tuned models. In this paper, we introduce MonoSoup, a simple, data-free, hyperparameter-free, post-hoc method that achieves a strong ID-OOD balance using only a single checkpoint. Our method applies Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to each layer's update and decomposes it into high-energy directions that capture task-specific adaptation and low-energy directions that introduce noise but may still encode residual signals useful for robustness. MonoSoup then uses entropy-based effective rank to automatically re-weigh these components with layer-wise coefficients that account for the spectral and geometric structure of the model. Experiments on CLIP models fine-tuned on ImageNet and evaluated under natural distribution shifts, as well as on Qwen language models tested on mathematical reasoning and multiple-choice benchmarks, show that this plug-and-play approach is a practical and effective alternative to multi-checkpoint methods, retaining much of their benefits without their computational overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_09689
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Model soups need only one ingredient
Abdollahpoorrostam, Alireza
Dimitriadis, Nikolaos
Hazimeh, Adam
Frossard, Pascal
Machine Learning
Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on a target distribution often improves in-distribution (ID) accuracy, but at the cost of out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness as representations specialize to the fine-tuning data. Weight-space ensembling methods, such as Model Soups, mitigate this effect by averaging multiple checkpoints, but they are computationally prohibitive, requiring the training and storage of dozens of fine-tuned models. In this paper, we introduce MonoSoup, a simple, data-free, hyperparameter-free, post-hoc method that achieves a strong ID-OOD balance using only a single checkpoint. Our method applies Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to each layer's update and decomposes it into high-energy directions that capture task-specific adaptation and low-energy directions that introduce noise but may still encode residual signals useful for robustness. MonoSoup then uses entropy-based effective rank to automatically re-weigh these components with layer-wise coefficients that account for the spectral and geometric structure of the model. Experiments on CLIP models fine-tuned on ImageNet and evaluated under natural distribution shifts, as well as on Qwen language models tested on mathematical reasoning and multiple-choice benchmarks, show that this plug-and-play approach is a practical and effective alternative to multi-checkpoint methods, retaining much of their benefits without their computational overhead.
title Model soups need only one ingredient
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09689