Fisher Mask Nodes for Language Model Merging

Thennal D K, Ganesh Nathan, Suchithra M S


Abstract
Fine-tuning pre-trained models provides significant advantages in downstream performance. The ubiquitous nature of pre-trained models such as BERT and its derivatives in natural language processing has also led to a proliferation of task-specific fine-tuned models. As these models typically only perform one task well, additional training or ensembling is required in multi-task scenarios. The growing field of model merging provides a solution, dealing with the challenge of combining multiple task-specific models into a single multi-task model. In this study, we introduce a novel model merging method for Transformers, combining insights from previous work in Fisher-weighted averaging and the use of Fisher information in model pruning. Utilizing the Fisher information of mask nodes within the Transformer architecture, we devise a computationally efficient weighted-averaging scheme. Our method exhibits a regular and significant performance increase across various models in the BERT family, outperforming full-scale Fisher-weighted averaging in a fraction of the computational cost, with baseline performance improvements of up to +6.5 and a speedup between 57.4x and 321.7x across models. Our results prove the potential of our method in current multi-task learning environments and suggest its scalability and adaptability to new model architectures and learning scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.647
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
7349–7355
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.647
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Thennal D K, Ganesh Nathan, and Suchithra M S. 2024. Fisher Mask Nodes for Language Model Merging. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 7349–7355, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Fisher Mask Nodes for Language Model Merging (D K et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.647.pdf