@inproceedings{xu-etal-2026-investigating-cross,
title = "Investigating Cross-Modal Skill Injection: Scenarios, Methods, and Hyperparameters",
author = "Xu, Zhiyu and
Wang, Lean and
Liu, Yuanxin and
Li, Lei and
Zhou, Hao and
Meng, Fandong and
Zhou, Jie and
Sun, Xu",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.571/",
pages = "12546--12563",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general multi-modal understanding; yet they struggle to efficiently acquire continually evolving domain-specific skills. Conventional approaches to enhancing VLM capabilities, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), require extensive dataset curation and substantial computational resources. Model merging has emerged as an efficient alternative that enables the transfer of domain-specific expertise from Large Language Models (LLMs) to VLMs without incurring additional training data requirements or significant computational overhead. Unlike conventional merging of homogeneous LLMs, which mainly aggregates existing capabilities, cross-modal skill injection aims to induce emergent cross-modal capabilities by integrating a domain-expert LLM into a VLM. However, existing research lacks a systematic analysis of the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection. In this study, we investigate cross-modal skill injection across three main aspects: scenarios, methods, and hyperparameters. For scenarios, we find that cross-modal skill injection generally performs well in instruction-following and cross-lingual settings, yet struggles with mathematical reasoning. For methods, we find that classic approaches such as TA and DARE consistently achieve superior performance over alternative merging methods. We also provide a systematic and quantitative analysis of the hyperparameter tuning that these classic methods critically depend on."
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<abstract>Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general multi-modal understanding; yet they struggle to efficiently acquire continually evolving domain-specific skills. Conventional approaches to enhancing VLM capabilities, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), require extensive dataset curation and substantial computational resources. Model merging has emerged as an efficient alternative that enables the transfer of domain-specific expertise from Large Language Models (LLMs) to VLMs without incurring additional training data requirements or significant computational overhead. Unlike conventional merging of homogeneous LLMs, which mainly aggregates existing capabilities, cross-modal skill injection aims to induce emergent cross-modal capabilities by integrating a domain-expert LLM into a VLM. However, existing research lacks a systematic analysis of the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection. In this study, we investigate cross-modal skill injection across three main aspects: scenarios, methods, and hyperparameters. For scenarios, we find that cross-modal skill injection generally performs well in instruction-following and cross-lingual settings, yet struggles with mathematical reasoning. For methods, we find that classic approaches such as TA and DARE consistently achieve superior performance over alternative merging methods. We also provide a systematic and quantitative analysis of the hyperparameter tuning that these classic methods critically depend on.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Investigating Cross-Modal Skill Injection: Scenarios, Methods, and Hyperparameters
%A Xu, Zhiyu
%A Wang, Lean
%A Liu, Yuanxin
%A Li, Lei
%A Zhou, Hao
%A Meng, Fandong
%A Zhou, Jie
%A Sun, Xu
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F xu-etal-2026-investigating-cross
%X Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general multi-modal understanding; yet they struggle to efficiently acquire continually evolving domain-specific skills. Conventional approaches to enhancing VLM capabilities, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), require extensive dataset curation and substantial computational resources. Model merging has emerged as an efficient alternative that enables the transfer of domain-specific expertise from Large Language Models (LLMs) to VLMs without incurring additional training data requirements or significant computational overhead. Unlike conventional merging of homogeneous LLMs, which mainly aggregates existing capabilities, cross-modal skill injection aims to induce emergent cross-modal capabilities by integrating a domain-expert LLM into a VLM. However, existing research lacks a systematic analysis of the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection. In this study, we investigate cross-modal skill injection across three main aspects: scenarios, methods, and hyperparameters. For scenarios, we find that cross-modal skill injection generally performs well in instruction-following and cross-lingual settings, yet struggles with mathematical reasoning. For methods, we find that classic approaches such as TA and DARE consistently achieve superior performance over alternative merging methods. We also provide a systematic and quantitative analysis of the hyperparameter tuning that these classic methods critically depend on.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.571/
%P 12546-12563
Markdown (Informal)
[Investigating Cross-Modal Skill Injection: Scenarios, Methods, and Hyperparameters](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.571/) (Xu et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Zhiyu Xu, Lean Wang, Yuanxin Liu, Lei Li, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, and Xu Sun. 2026. Investigating Cross-Modal Skill Injection: Scenarios, Methods, and Hyperparameters. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12546–12563, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.