Weight Weaving: Parameter Pooling for Data-Free Model Merging

Levy Chaves, Eduardo Valle, Sandra Avila

Track: Proceedings Track

Keywords: model merging, weights-ensemble, data-free merging, multi-task-learning, continual learning, domain generalization

Abstract:

Model merging provides cost-effective, data-efficient combination of specialized deep neural networks through parameter integration. This technique exploits specialist model strengths across downstream tasks without retraining. Most model merging approaches critically depend on scaling hyper-parameters $\lambda$, weighting each model's contribution globally or individually. Principled approaches for setting scaling factors without accessing any data (data-free) are scarce, often leading researchers to tune $\lambda$ using privileged data from the evaluation set, which is obviously unfeasible in practice. To address this limitation, we introduce Weight Weaving,
a plug-and-play technique that pools model weights across $\lambda$ values search space using user-defined pooling functions, such as averaging, random selection, or even existing model merging methods. Our method demonstrates high modularity, imposing minimal search space constraints. It operates orthogonally to existing model merging methods and eliminates evaluation data requirements. We validate Weight Weaving across three ViT variants in three experimental setups: vision multi-task learning, vision continual learning, and domain generalization. Our method consistently improves the performance of several model merging methods, achieving average accuracy gains of up to 15.9 percentage points in a data-free setting.

Submission Number: 73