LM-Cocktail: Resilient Tuning of Language Models via Model Merging

Shitao Xiao, Zheng Liu, Peitian Zhang, Xingrun Xing


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.145
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2474–2488
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.145/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.145
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shitao Xiao, Zheng Liu, Peitian Zhang, and Xingrun Xing. 2024. LM-Cocktail: Resilient Tuning of Language Models via Model Merging. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 2474–2488, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LM-Cocktail: Resilient Tuning of Language Models via Model Merging (Xiao et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.145.pdf