Xingrun Xing


2024

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LM-Cocktail: Resilient Tuning of Language Models via Model Merging
Shitao Xiao | Zheng Liu | Peitian Zhang | Xingrun Xing
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

The pre-trained language models are continually fine-tuned to better support downstream applications. However, this operation may result in significant performance degeneration on general tasks beyond the targeted domain. To overcome this problem, we propose LM-Cocktail which enables the fine-tuned model to stay resilient in general perspectives. Our method is conducted in the form of model merging, where the fine-tuned language model is merged with the pre-trained base model or the peer models from other domains through weighted average. Despite simplicity, LM-Cocktail is surprisingly effective: the resulted model is able to achieve a strong empirical performance in the whole scope of general tasks while preserving a superior capacity in its targeted domain.