FREE-Merging: Fourier Transform for Model Merging with Lightweight Experts

In the current era of rapid expansion in model scale, there is an increasing availability of open-source model weights for various tasks. However, the capabilities of a single fine-tuned model often fall short of meeting diverse deployment needs. Model merging has thus emerged as a widely focused method for efficiently building a single model tailored for multiple tasks combined from existing models. Nevertheless, existing model merging methods face challenging trade-offs between performance and deployment costs, primarily due to task conflicts within the merged network. Our analysis of neural networks reveals that some task-specific information introduced by fine-tuning minimally enhances performance but heavily impacts generalization, leading to task conflicts. To mitigate the impact of this information, we propose FR-Merging, an innovative method that leverages frequency domain information to efficiently filter harmful specialized information, thereby minimizing the impact of task conflicts on the backbone with minimal cost. Since performance loss is inevitable with cost-free merging methods, we introduce a lightweight task-specific expert that can be dynamically integrated during inference to compensate for information loss. This framework, FREE-Merging (FR-Merging with lightweight experts), strikes a balanced trade-off between training cost, inference speed, storage requirements, and performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both FR-Merging and FREE-Merging on multiple tasks across CV, NLP, and Multi-Modal domains and show that they can be flexibly adapted to meet specific needs.