Stay Unique, Stay Efficient: Preserving Model Personality in Multi-Task Merging

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01461v1
• Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2025 09:47:17 GMT
• Title: Stay Unique, Stay Efficient: Preserving Model Personality in Multi-Task Merging
• Authors: Kuangpu Guo, Yuhe Ding, Jian Liang, Zilei Wang, Ran He,
• Abstract summary: Decomposition, Thresholding, and Scaling (DTS) is an approximation-based personalized merging framework.<n>DTS preserves task-specific information with minimal storage overhead.<n>We extend DTS with a variant that fuses task-specific information in a data-free manner based on the semantic similarity of task characteristics.
• Score: 62.61159948488935
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling multi-task capabilities without additional training. However, existing methods often experience substantial performance degradation compared with individually fine-tuned models, even on similar tasks, underscoring the need to preserve task-specific information. This paper proposes Decomposition, Thresholding, and Scaling (DTS), an approximation-based personalized merging framework that preserves task-specific information with minimal storage overhead. DTS first applies singular value decomposition to the task-specific information and retains only a small subset of singular values and vectors. It then introduces a novel thresholding strategy that partitions singular vector elements into groups and assigns a scaling factor to each group. To enable generalization to unseen tasks, we further extend DTS with a variant that fuses task-specific information in a data-free manner based on the semantic similarity of task characteristics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DTS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while requiring only 1\% additional storage per task. Furthermore, experiments on unseen tasks show that the DTS variant achieves significantly better generalization performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/krumpguo/DTS.

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