DMM: Building a Versatile Image Generation Model via Distillation-Based
  Model Merging
Authors: name: Tianhui Song; name: Weixin Feng; name: Shuai Wang; name: Xubin Li; name: Tiezheng Ge; name: Bo Zheng; name: Limin Wang
Published: 2025-04-16 15:09:45

Abstract: The success of text-to-image (T2I) generation models has spurred a
proliferation of numerous model checkpoints fine-tuned from the same base model
on various specialized datasets. This overwhelming specialized model production
introduces new challenges for high parameter redundancy and huge storage cost,
thereby necessitating the development of effective methods to consolidate and
unify the capabilities of diverse powerful models into a single one. A common
practice in model merging adopts static linear interpolation in the parameter
space to achieve the goal of style mixing. However, it neglects the features of
T2I generation task that numerous distinct models cover sundry styles which may
lead to incompatibility and confusion in the merged model. To address this
issue, we introduce a style-promptable image generation pipeline which can
accurately generate arbitrary-style images under the control of style vectors.
Based on this design, we propose the score distillation based model merging
paradigm (DMM), compressing multiple models into a single versatile T2I model.
Moreover, we rethink and reformulate the model merging task in the context of
T2I generation, by presenting new merging goals and evaluation protocols. Our
experiments demonstrate that DMM can compactly reorganize the knowledge from
multiple teacher models and achieve controllable arbitrary-style generation.