Title: AdaRank: Adaptive Rank Pruning for Enhanced Model Merging
Primary area: transfer learning, meta learning, and lifelong learning
Keywords: Model Merging, Task Arithmetic

Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a promising approach for unifying independently fine-tuned models into an integrated framework, significantly enhancing computational efficiency in multi-task learning. Recently, several SVD-based techniques have been introduced to exploit low-rank structures for enhanced merging, but their reliance on heuristically designed rank selection often leads to inter-task interference and suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose AdaRank, a model merging framework that replaces this heuristic selection by adaptively selecting the beneficial singular components of task vectors to merge multiple models. We first show empirically that (i) selecting only the top singular components of task vectors can cause critical interference with other tasks, and (ii) assigning fixed ranks does not align with the varying complexity of tasks and layers. AdaRank addresses both issues by adapting per-component masks, indicating the selection of the component, to the unlabeled test data with entropy minimization. Our experimental findings show that AdaRank consistently improves existing merging methods across diverse backbones from different modalities, largely narrowing the performance gap against individually fine-tuned models.