MetaGPT: Merging Large Language Models Using Model Exclusive Task Arithmetic
<|reference_start|>MetaGPT: Merging Large Language Models Using Model Exclusive Task Arithmetic: The advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 has catalyzed the exploration of multi-task learning (MTL), in which a single model demonstrates proficiency across diverse tasks. Task arithmetic has emerged as a cost-effective approach for MTL. It enables performance enhancement across multiple tasks by adding their corresponding task vectors to a pre-trained model. However, the current lack of a method that can simultaneously achieve optimal performance, computational efficiency, and data privacy limits their application to LLMs. In this paper, we propose \textbf{M}odel \textbf{E}xclusive \textbf{T}ask \textbf{A}rithmetic for merging \textbf{GPT}-scale models, which formalizes the objective of model merging into a multi-task learning framework, aiming to minimize the average loss difference between the merged model and each individual task model. Since data privacy limits the use of multi-task training data, we leverage LLMs' local linearity and task vectors' orthogonality to separate the data term and scaling coefficients term and derive a model-exclusive task arithmetic method. Our proposed MetaGPT is data-agnostic and bypasses the heavy search process, making it cost-effective and easy to implement for LLMs.Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaGPT leads to improvements in task arithmetic and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple tasks.<|reference_end|>
@article{zhou2024metagpt:,
    title={MetaGPT: Merging Large Language Models Using Model Exclusive Task
  Arithmetic},
    author={Yuyan Zhou, Liang Song, Bingning Wang and Weipeng Chen},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.11385},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2406.11385},
    primaryClass={cs.CL}
}